4.5 'Every love story is a potential grief story'

Просто несколько цитат из очень личной книги любимого автора.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time, but that doesn’t matter. The world has been changed nonetheless.

'... aeronaut experiences health of body and health of soul. Altitude ‘reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the Truth’. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: ‘How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away … and forgiveness descends.’

Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.

December 1968, the Apollo 8 mission lifted off for its journey to the moon. On Christmas Eve, the spacecraft passed behind the far side of the moon and entered lunar orbit. As it emerged, the astronauts were the first humans to see a phenomenon for which a new word was needed: ‘earthrise’. The pilot of the lunar module, William Anders, using a specially adapted Hasselblad camera, photographed a two-thirds-full Earth soaring in a night sky. His pictures show it in luscious colour, with feathery cloud cover, swirling storm systems, rich blue seas and rusty continents.

Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.

I always keep my promises.’ ‘Always?’ ‘Always if I intend to. Of course there are promises I do not intend to keep when I make them. But those are hardly promises, are they?’

Do not let your actions be governed by your fears.

In the middle of the studio is a cage containing a tiny monkey and a parrot with an enormous bill. The monkey is a whirr of motion, zipping around on the trapeze, and constantly tormenting the parrot, pulling out its feathers and ‘martyrising’ it. And though the parrot could easily cut the monkey in half with its beak, it does nothing but utter plaintive, heart-rending cries. Goncourt feels sorry for the poor parrot, and comments on the dreadful life it is forced to endure. Whereupon it is explained to him that bird and beast had once been separated, but that the parrot had almost died of grief. It only recovered after being put back into the cage with its tormentor.

Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still – at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) – it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

We are bad at dealing with death, that banal, unique thing; we can no longer make it part of a wider pattern. And as E. M. Forster put it, ‘One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another.’

When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. Before, they had been more or less invisible.

Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that – if it is not moral in its effect – then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.

seventeenth-century maps which feature the Desert of Loss, the (windless) Lake of Indifference, the (dried-up) River of Desolation, the Bog of Self-Pity, and the (subterranean) Caverns of Memory.

[Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice] ... it was the fact that no one in his senses would turn and look at Euridice, knowing what the consequence would be. <...> Of course Orfeo would turn to look at the pleading Euridice – how could he not? Because, while ‘no one in his senses’ would do so, he is quite out of his senses with love and grief and hope.

dreams are more reliable, more secure, than memory.

The paradox of grief: if I have survived what is now four years of her absence, it is because I have had four years of her presence. And her active continuance disproves what I earlier pessimistically asserted. Grief can, after all, in some ways, turn out to be a moral space.

perhaps it only applies in the States, where emotional optimism is a constitutional duty

There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse.

‘The cure for loneliness is solitude,’ Marianne Moore advises. While Peter Grimes (if not in all respects a role model) sings: ‘I live alone. The habit grows.’ There is a balance to such words, a comforting harmony.