Outline Cusk Quotes

What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.

As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.

The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite – and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.

There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

You could spend your whole life’, she said, ‘trying to trace events back to your own mistakes.

I mean, you never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn’t find the time, do you?

That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

Music,' she said, in a languorous and dreamlike manner. 'Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.

And of those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was more real?

But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures.

And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people's lives a commentary on my own.

A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.

Yet I still, he said, believe in love. Love restores almost everything, and where it can’t restore, it takes away the pain.

I would like”, she resumed, “to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.

For many women,’ she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,’ she said, ‘the mother’s sacrifice of herself is absolute, which mine never could have been, and which no woman’s ought to be these days.

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed, the hope that they might one day return. To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting;

The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight.

Writing comes out of tension, tension between what's inside and what's outside.

we’ve become convinced that if we say even a word out of place we’ve marked them forever, but of course that is ridiculous, and in any case, why should their lives be perfect? It is our own idea of perfection that plagues us, and it is rooted in our own desires.

That is always a dangerous moment, he said, to make a big decision, when you are not sure of what you deserve. Evidently his friends shared his opinion, because all of them urged him, without hesitation, to take it. It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. Perhaps, he said, we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost.

I probably didn’t share his feelings – he hoped, really, that I didn’t – but he was no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.

I would like to be a D.H. Lawrence character, living in one of his novels. The people I meet don’t even seem to have characters. And life seems so rich, when I look at it through his eyes, yet my own life very often appears sterile, like a bad patch of earth, as if nothing will grow there however hard I try.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to be convince yourself of.

If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn’t want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it, to draw it forth, lest it strike her when her back was turned.

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes.

What she couldn’t stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily. She herself, she said, was quite willing to use others too, but she only recognised it once they had admitted this intention in themselves.

What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.

while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank

...when my sons were the ages of those two leaping boys, they were so intimate it would have been hard to disentangle their separate natures. They used to play together without pause from the moment they opened their eyes in the morning to the moment they closed them again. Their play was a kind of shared trance in which they created whole imaginary worlds, and they were forever involved in games and projects whose planning and execution were as real to them as they were invisible to everyone else: sometimes I would move or throw away some apparently inconsequential item, only to be told that it was a sacred prop in the ongoing make-believe, a narrative which seemed to run like a magic river through our household, inexhaustible, and which they could exit and re-enter at will, moving over that threshold which no one else could see into another element. And then one day the river dried up: their shared world of imagination ceased, and the reason was that one of them - I can't even recall which one it was - stopped believing in it. In other words, it was nobody's fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.

But in a way it's like looking at old photographs of yourself. There comes a point at which the record needs to be updated, because you've shed too many links with what you were. He doesn't quite know how it happened; all he knows is that he doesn't recognize himself in those stories any more, though he remembers the bursting feeling of writing them, something in himself massing and pushing irresistibly to be born. He hasn't had that feeling since; he almost thinks that to remain a writer he'd have to become one all over again, when he might just easily become an astronaut, or a farmer. It's as if he can't quite remember what drove him into words in the first place, all those years before, yet words are what he still deals in. I suppose it's a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that's never repeated. It's the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground.

All the same, it seemed to him now that that life had been lived almost unconsciously, that he had been lost in it, absorbed in it, as you can be absorbed in a book, believing in its events and living entirely through and with its characters. Never again since had he been able to absorb himself; never again had he been able to believe in that way. Perhaps it was that – the loss of belief – that constituted his yearning for the old life.

And he was more Irish in America than he’d ever been at home.

I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.

Evlilik, başka şeylerin yanında, bir inanç sistemidir, bir öyküdür de ve kendini son derece gerçek şeylerde göstermesine rağmen, yürümesini sağlayan şey eninde sonunda gizemlidir.

The parts of life that are suffocating’, Angeliki said, ‘are so often the parts that are the projection of our parents’ own desires

I said that I thought most of us didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.

He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.

It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don’t hold on to them the sea will take them too.

This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying - it seemed to me – was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction that they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become – to put it bluntly - anathema to me.

All the same, it seemed to him now that that life had been lived almost unconsciously, that he had been lost in it, absorbed in it, as you can be absorbed in a book, believing in its events and living entirely through and with its characters. Never again since had he been able to absorb himself; never again had he been able to believe in that way. Perhaps it was that – the loss of belief – that constituted his yearning for the old life. Whatever it was, he and his wife had built things that had flourished, had together expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them, had treated them abundantly, and this – he now saw – was what had given him the confidence to break it all, break it with what now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness, because he thought there would be more. More what? I asked. ‘More – life,’ he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. ‘And more affection,’ he added, after a pause. ‘I wanted more affection.

My neighbour turned to me again, and asked me what work it was that was taking me to Athens. For the second time I felt the conscious effort of his enquiry, as though he had trained himself in the recovery of objects that were falling from his grasp. I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing – a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball – and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure.

But his own mother had once said to him, in the period after his first marriage had ended when he was deeply concerned about the effect the divorce was having on the children, that family life was bittersweet no matter what you did. If it wasn’t divorce it would be something else, she said. There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain. And as for divorce, even if you lived like a saint you would still experience all the same losses, however much you tried to explain them away. I could weep just to think that I’ll never see you again as you were at the age of six – I would give anything, she said, to meet that six-year-old one more time. But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful

mutual frankness that she could work out who she herself was and what she actually wanted.

At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was being left behind.

Aslında, hayran kaldığım bir şey okuduğumda, ondan söz etmekten gitgide daha az hoşlandığımı fark etmiştim. (...) Artık hiç kimseyi hiçbir şeye ikna etmek istemiyordum.

I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.

A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn’t buy your way into it.

Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in an animal's fur: the deeper they're buried the better.

it is the very thing you don’t see, the thing you take for granted, that deceives you. And how can you even know you have taken something for granted until it is no longer there?

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative, but in this story the two poles had become dissociated and ascribed separate, warring identities.

Sometimes, I said, the loss of transition became the gain of simplicity.

And saying you love him is the same as saying you don’t want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,’ she said, ‘you would find out.

you had said those things to him, you understand, you would have heard some truths in return. If you had been frank you would have elicited frankness.

This feeling, of being negated at the same time as I was exposed, had had a particularly powerful effect on me, I said.

There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain.

And if there's one thing I know it's that writing comes out of tension, tension between what's inside and what's outside.

All she wishes is for her life to be integrated, to be one thing, rather than an eternal series of oppositions that confound her whichever way she looks.

Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.

I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

Life is sending you in one direction and you're pulling away in another, like you're disagreeing with your own destiny, like who you are is in disagreement with who they say you are.

The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public: when peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality.

But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also – as you say, by the same logic – something I will feel driven to provoke.

If he could only love what he did not know, and be loved in return on that same basis, then knowledge became an inexorable disenchantment, for which the only cure was to fall in love with someone new.

What she couldn't stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily.

As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition - I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

I would like’, she resumed, ‘to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown, where I have no identity and no associations.

The polarisation of man and woman was a structure, a form: she had only felt it once it was gone, and it almost seemed as though the collapse of that structure, that equipoise, was responsible for the extremity that followed

She herself, she said, had visited the very depths of disillusionment in the male character by being honest in precisely this way: men who had claimed one minute to be dying of love for her were openly insulting her the next,

The problem is, they said, he has no fear. But it seems to me that exactly the reverse is true: he has too much fear, so much that he is driven to enact the thing of which he is afraid, lest it should happen of its own accord.

In other words, it was nobody’s fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.

Yet I believe, as I say, that it was precisely this underhand act that gave birth to her vitriol, for people are at their least forgiving when they themselves have been underhand, as though they would exact their innocence from you at any price.

The longing was easy enough to understand: it was what the Greeks called nostos, a word we translated as ‘homesickness’, though she had never liked that word. It seemed very English to try to pass off an emotional state as a sort of stomach bug.

no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement

the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women and that you are always trying to purge with what you call frankness. As soon as you cease to be frank, you see a stain, you are forced to acknowledge imperfection, and you want only to run away and hide in shame.

In his marriage, he now realised, the principle of progress was always at work, in the acquiring of houses, possessions, cars, the drive towards higher social status, more travel, a wider circle of friends, even the production of children felt like an obligatory calling-point on the mad journey; and it was inevitable, he now saw, that once there were no more things to add or improve on, no more goals to achieve or stages to pass through, the journey would seem to have run its course, and he and his wife would be beset by a great sense of futility and by the feeling of some malady, which was really only the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion, such as sailors experience when they walk on dry land after too long at sea, but which to both of them signified that they were no longer in love.

the translator says that a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal. Those lines concerned the art of writing, but looking around himself in early middle age my neighbour began to see that they applied just as much to the art of living. Everywhere he looked he saw people as it were ruined by the extremity of their own experiences, and his new parents-in-law appeared to be a case in point.

Tüm yazarlar ilgi meraklısıdır. Aslında biz çocukken kimse bizi yeterince önemsememiş, biz de şimdi onlara bunun bedelini ödetiyoruz. Yaptığı işlerdeki çocuksu intikam unsurunu reddeden yazar ona göre yalancıydı. Yazı yazmak yalnızca adaleti kendi ellerinize almanın bir yoluydu.

we drifted around and around, with the sun on our faces and our bodies hanging like three white roots beneath the water. I can see us there still,’ he said, ‘for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten

It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.

I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed, the hope that they might one day return. To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting; we could no longer be found at the usual number, the usual address.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity. I could swim out into the sea as far as I liked, if what I wanted was to drown. Yet this impulse, this desire to be free, was still compelling to me: I still, somehow, believed in it, despite having proved that everything about it was illusory.

At evening, with the sun no longer overhead, the air developed a kind of viscosity in which time seemed to stand very still and the labyrinth of the city, no longer bisected by light and shade and unstirred by the afternoon breezes, appeared suspended in a kind of dream, paused in an atmosphere of extraordinary pallor and thickness.

At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.

It was never said of history, for instance, that it shouldn’t be talked about; on the contrary, in terms of history silence was forgetting, and it was the thing people feared most of all when it was their own history that was at risk of being forgotten. And history, really, was invisible, though its monuments still stood. The making of the monuments was half of it, but the rest was interpretation. Yet there was something worse than forgetting, which was misrepresentation, bias, the selective presentation of events. The truth had to be represented: it couldn’t just be left to represent itself, as for instance she had left it to the police after the incident, and found herself more or less sidelined.

She was particularly jealous of the eldest, a boy, whose every movement she criticized. She watched him with an obsessiveness that was quite extraordinary to behold, and she was always putting him to work around the house, blaming him for the smallest evidence of disorder and insisting on her right to punish him for what she alone thought of as misdemeanor.

Let's just say that drama became something very real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out on the wold. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her. I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.

replied that I wasn’t sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a ‘real’ self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist.

the translator says that a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal. Those lines concerned the art of writing, but looking around himself in early middle age my neighbour began to see that they applied just as much to the art of living.

It was nearly thirty years since his first marriage ended, and the further he got from that life, the more real it became to him. Or not real exactly, he said – what had happened since had been real enough. The word he was looking for was authentic: his first marriage had been authentic in a way that nothing ever had again. The older he got, the more it represented to him a kind of home, a place to which he yearned to return.

As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition – I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing attaches a form to a file. Ann Williams turns a page. Anand Singh turns two pages at once by mistake and turns one back which makes a slightly different sound. David Cusk turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages of two separate files at the same time. Ken Wax turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Chris Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ann Williams sniffs slightly and turns a page. Meredith Rand does something to a cuticle. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Kenneth ‘Type of Thing’ Hindle detaches a Memo 402-C(1) from a file. ‘Second-Knuckle’ Bob McKenzie looks up briefly while turning a page. David Cusk turns a page. A yawn proceeds across one Chalk’s row by unconscious influence. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Rotes Group Room 2 hushed and brightly lit, half a football field in length. Howard Cardwell shifts slightly in his chair and turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. traces his jaw’s outline with his ring finger. Ed Shackleford turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Ken Wax attaches a Memo 20 to a file. Anand Singh turns a page. Jay Landauer and Ann Williams turn a page almost precisely in sync although they are in different rows and cannot see each other. Boris Kratz bobs with a slight Hassidic motion as he crosschecks a page with a column of figures. Ken Wax turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. Ambient room temperature 80° F. Sandra Pounder makes a minute adjustment to a file so that the page she is looking at is at a slightly different angle to her. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Each Tingle’s two-tiered hemisphere of boxes. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Six wigglers per Chalk, four Chalks per Team, six Teams per group. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Plus administration and support. Bob McKenzie turns a page. Anand Singh turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Ken Wax turns a page. Chris ‘The Maestro’ Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Boris Kratz turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages. Anand Singh turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown uncrosses his legs and turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. The slow squeak of the cart boy’s cart at the back of the room. Ken Wax places a file on top of the stack in the Cart-Out box to his upper right. Jay Landauer turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page and then folds over the page of a computer printout that’s lined up next to the original file he just turned a page of. Ken Wax turns a page. Bob Mc-Kenzie turns a page. Ellis Ross turns a page. Joe ‘The Bastard’ Biron-Maint turns a page. Ed Shackleford opens a drawer and takes a moment to select just the right paperclip. Olive Borden turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Paul Howe turns a page and then sniffs circumspectly at the green rubber sock on his pinkie’s tip. Olive Borden turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Devils are actually angels. Elpidia Carter and Harriet Candelaria reach up to their Cart-In boxes at exactly the same time. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. ‘Type of Thing’ Ken Hindle looks up a routing code. Some with their chin in their hand. Robert Atkins turns a page even as he’s crosschecking something on that page. Ann Williams turns a page. Ed Shackleford searches a file for a supporting document. Joe Biron-Maint turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page.

The Cunning Little Vixen, in which a fox is caught by a hunter and kept in a farmyard with the other animals. He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity. But her nature drives her to seek the wild, and one day she escapes the farmyard and finds her way back into the forest; but instead of feeling liberated she is terrified, for having lived in the farmyard most of her life she has forgotten how to be free.

My mother once admitted, I said, that she used to be desperate for us to leave the house for school, but that once we’d gone she had no idea what to do with herself and wished that we would come back. And she still, even now that her children were adults, would conclude our visits quite forcefully and usher us all off to our own homes, as though something terrible would have happened if we had stayed. Yet I was quite sure that she experienced that same sense of loss after we’d gone, and wondered what she was looking for and why she had driven us away in order to look for it.

Never again since had he been able to absorb himself; never again had he been able to believe in that way. Perhaps it was that - the loss of belief - that constituted his yearning for the old life. Whatever it was, he and his wife had built things that had flourished, had together expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them, had treated them abundantly, and this - he now saw - was what had given him the confidence to break it all, break it with what now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness, because he thought there would be more. More what? I asked. “More life” - he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. “And more affection” he added, after a pause. “I wanted more affection.

I began to feel for the first time that I was seeing what was really there, without asking myself whether or not I was expecting to see it. When I think back to the time before, and especially to the years of my marriage, it seems to me as though my wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion. We never, I think, discovered the true nature of the things we saw, any more than we were ever in danger of being affected by them; we peered at them, at people and places, like people on a ship peer at the passing mainland, and should we have seen them in any kind of trouble, or they us, there would have been nothing whatever either one of us could have done about it.

It's true,' Elena said, 'that my own need for provocation is something other people seem to find very difficult to understand. Yet to me it has always made perfect sense. But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also - as you say, by the same logic - something I will feel driven to provoke. If the relationship is going to end, in other words, I want to know it and confront it as soon as possible. Sometimes,' she said, 'this process is so quick that the relationship is over almost as soon as it has begun. Very often I have felt that my relationships have had no story, and the reason is because I have jumped ahead of myself, the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter. I want to know everything straight away. I want to know the content without living through the time span.

For many women,' she said, 'having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,' she said, 'the mother's sacrifice of herself is absolute, which mine never could have been, and which no woman's ought to be these days. My own mother lived through me in a way that was completely uncritical,' she said, 'and the consequence was that I came into adulthood unprepared for life, because nobody saw me as important in the way she did, which was the way I was used to being seen. And then you meet a man who thinks you're important enough to marry you, so it seems right that you should say yes. But it is when you have a baby that the feeling of importance really returns,' she said, with growing passion, 'except that one day you realise that all this - the house, the husband, the child - isn't importance after all, in fact it is the exact opposite: you have become a slave, obliterated!

Was it not the case, said Aris – the boy who the previous day had mentioned the putrefying dog – that we use animals as pure reflections of human consciousness, while at the same time their existence exerts a sort of moral force by which human beings feel objectified and therefore safely contained? Like slaves, he said, or servants, in whose absence their masters would feel vulnerable. They watch us living; they prove that we are real; through them, we access the story of ourselves. In our interactions with them we – not they – are shown to be what we are. Surely – for human beings – the most important thing about an animal, he said, is that it can’t speak. His own story concerned a hamster he had when he was small. He used to watch it run in its cage. It had a wheel it ran around. It was always running – the wheel whirred and whirred. Yet it never went anywhere. He loved his hamster. He understood that if he loved it he had to set it free. The hamster ran away, and he never saw it again.

This room contained, as well as many books, several painted wooden models of boats, which had been mounted to the walls. They were very intricately and beautifully made, down to the miniature coils of rope and tiny brass instruments on their sanded decks, and the larger ones had white sails arranged in curving attitudes of such tension and complexity that it did indeed seem as though the wind was blowing in them. When you looked more closely, you saw that the sails were attached to countless tiny cords, so fine as to make them almost invisible, which had fixed them in these shapes. It required only a couple of steps to move from the impression of wind in the sails to the sight of the mesh of fine cords, a metaphor I felt sure Clelia had intended to illustrate the relationship between illusion and reality, though she did not perhaps expect her guests to go one step further, as I did, and reach out a hand to touch the white cloth, which was not cloth at all but paper, unexpectedly dry and brittle. Clelia’s

But now it was she who could not be found: she was plunging down cold white mountainsides in the Arlberg, where he did not exist for her any more than she existed for him. She didn’t answer his calls, or answered them curtly, distractedly, saying she had to go. She could not be called upon to recognize him, and this was the most bewildering thing of all, for it made him feel absolutely unreal. It was with her, after all, that his identity had been forged: if she no longer recognized him, then who was he?

Vanity', he said, 'is the curse of our culture; or perhaps it is simply my own persistent refusal', he said, 'to believe that artists are also human beings.

What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of

Mesmo assim, parecia-lhe agora que a vida fora vivida de maneira quase inconsciente, que ele havia se perdido nela, fora absorvido por ela, como se pode ser absorvido por um livro, acreditar nos seus acontecimentos e viver inteiramente por meio de seus personagens e junto com eles. Nunca mais desde então ele conseguira se deixar absorver; nunca mais conseguira acreditar dessa forma. Talvez fosse isso — o fato de perder a fé — que constituísse o seu anseio pela antiga vida.

Lembrei-me de como, quando cada um de meus filhos era bebê, eles derrubavam as coisas do cadeirão de propósito para vê-las cair no chão, atividade tão prazerosa para eles quanto eram terríveis as suas consequências. Fitavam o objeto caído — um biscoito mordido ou uma bola de plástico — e iam ficando cada vez mais agitados porque ele não retornava. Depois de algum tempo, começavam a chorar (...) o sofrimento era a mágica que fazia o objeto voltar e tornava o prazer de largá-lo possível outra vez.

Abraçou o conceito inteiro quase da noite para o dia: podia decidir como queria ser e então sê-lo. Não existia predestinação alguma; agora entendia que aquela noção de si mesmo como uma sina e uma maldição que havia pairado como uma mortalha sobre toda a sua vida podia ficar para trás.

Tudo que sabe é que não se reconhece mais nesses contos, embora recorde a sensação explosiva de escrevê-los, algo dentro dele se adensando e fazendo uma força irresistível para nascer. Nunca mais teve essa sensação; chega a pensar que, para continuar escritor, teria de se tornar escritor novamente, quando poderia com a mesma facilidade se tornar astronauta ou fazendeiro.

Whatever it was, he and his wife had built things that had flourished, had together expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them, had treated them abundantly, and this – he now saw – was what had given him the confidence to break it all, break it with what now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness, because he thought there would be more. More what? I asked. ‘More – life,’ he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. ‘And more affection,’ he added, after a pause. ‘I wanted more affection.

The story of who had done what to whom had to be told, and the matters of guilt and punishment established, though this never satisfied them either; in fact it made things worse, because it seemed to promise a resolution that never came. The more its intricacies were specified, the bigger and realer their argument grew. Each of them wanted more than anything to be declared right, and the other wrong, but it was impossible to assign blame entirely to either of them. And I realised eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point.

...maybe it's just you become disinhibited. He'd felt this last night, socializing with people in their twenties. He'd forgotten how phsysically shy they were.

...the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them.

built things that had flourished, had together expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them, had treated them abundantly, and this – he now saw – was what had given him the confidence to break it all, break it with what now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness, because he thought there would be more. More what? I asked.

More – life,’ he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. ‘And more affection,’ he added, after a pause. ‘I wanted more affection.

There was a great difference, I said, between the things that I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all. (pp 171)

Theo said it sounded like the problem was that she had chosen the wrong dog in the first place. He himself had a pug, he said, and he had never experienced any difficulties.

The silence was only a few seconds long, but in that period, while she failed to come in on time and to take up, as it were, her part in our lifelong duet, I understood, completely and definitively, that Chrysta and I were no longer married, and that the war we were embroiled in was not merely a bitterer version of the same lifelong engagement, but was something far more evil, something that had destruction, annihilation, non-existence as it's ambition.

The waiter brought the wine, a small unlabelled bottle the colour of ink, and Melete began to pour it out.

There was a carafe of pale yellow wine, a dish of olives on their stalks that looked bitter but tasted sweet and delicious, and a plate of cold, delicate mussles in their black shells

I suppose it's a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that's never repeated. It's the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground.

Looking at it I felt overcome with a sadness that was partly confusion, as though his back were a foreign country I was lost in; or not lost but exiled, is as much as the feeling of being lost was not attended by the hope that I would eventually find something I recognised.

Those times had more or less gone, now that she was with Konstantin: she wasn't sure why, because he would have never stopped her from going off travelling with Hermione, in fact he would have liked it, as modern men always liked it when you proved your independence from them. But it would have felt like a fake somehow, she said, a copy, to try to become those girls again, hurtling down those dirt roads, never knowing what they would find at the end of them.

I said it surprised me that his first wife, whom my neighbour had seemed rather to idealise in our earlier conversation, should behave with such coldness. It didn’t seem to fit with the impression I had formed of her character. He considered this, and then said that she hadn’t been like that in the time of their marriage: she had changed, had become a different person from the one that he knew. When he spoke of her fondly, it was the earlier version of herself he was speaking of. I said that I didn’t believe people could change so completely, could evolve an unrecognisable morality; it was merely that that part of themselves had lain dormant, waiting to be evoked by circumstance. I said that I thought most of us didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.

While I was in Poland,’ she said, ‘I vowed to develop a less sentimental view of life, and if there is something I regret in my novel, it is that the material circumstances of the characters are so comfortable. It would be a more serious book, I believe, if that were not the case. Spending time with Olga,’ she said, ‘certain things came to light for me, as objects under water come to light when the water drains away. I realised that our whole sense of life as a romance – even our conception of love itself – was a vision in which material things played far too great a role, and that without those things we might find that certain feelings diminished while others became accentuated. I was very attracted to the hardness of Olga,’ she said, ‘to the hardness of her life. When she spoke about her relationship with her husband it was as though she were speaking about the parts of an engine, explaining how they worked or did not work. There was no romance in it, no place that was covered up and that you weren’t allowed to see. ... I started to feel more sympathetic towards the husband, being treated like a car engine; and then she told me that for a period of time he had left, had left the family, unable to bear this lack of sentimentality any longer, and had gone and lived in a flat on his own. When he returned, they resumed their life as before. Was she not angry with him, I said, for deserting her and leaving her to take care of the children alone? No, on the contrary, she was pleased to see him. We are completely honest with one another, she said, and so I knew when he came back that it was because he had accepted the way things were. I tried to imagine,’ Angeliki said, ‘what this marriage was like, in which nobody had to make promises or apologise, in which you didn’t have to buy flowers for the other person or cook them a special meal or light the candles to make a flattering atmosphere, or book a holiday to help you get over your problems; or rather, in which you were made to do without those things and live together so honestly and nakedly.

he has too much fear, so much that he is driven to enact the thing of which he is afraid, lest it should happen of its own accord. I think that if I had known, as a child, what was possible in terms of pain, I might have had much the same response.

ellipsis, he’d been told, could literally be translated as ‘to hide behind silence’. It’s fascinating stuff, he said.

the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter

There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable. I asked her whether she lived in Manchester, and she said no, she had just been up there to teach another course, and had had to fly straight from there to here.

Lo inesperado a veces parece una invitación del destino.

I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing – a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball – and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure.

Es dificilísimo que hasta los más bondadosos, los que más te quieren, se tomen tus intereses verdaderamente en serio, porque suelen aconsejarte desde una vida más segura y más aislada que la tuya, en la que escapar no es una realidad, sino algo con lo que de vez en cuando sueñan.

My neighbour from the plane was a good foot shorter than me

The building, it so happened, was a music college of the kind she herself had left two years before, abandoning her lifelong hopes of becoming a professional musician; she recognised the piece as the D minor fugue from Bach's *French Suites*, a piece she had always loved and that caused her, hearing it so unexpectedly, to feel there on the pavement the most extraordinary sense of loss. It was as though the music had once belonged to her and now no longer did; as though she had been excluded from its beauty, was being forced to see it in the possession of someone else, and to revisit in its entirety her own sadness at her inability, for a number of reasons, to remain in that world.

She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she felt herself summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when 'Anne's life' just about covered it.

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse. And what is astonishing is how much details it gathers to itself, so that nothing remains untouched by it.

Il suo matrimonio, ora lo capiva, si era sempre ispirato al principio di progresso: nell'acquisto di case, terreni, automobili, nell'aspirazione a uno status sociale più elevato, più viaggi, una cerchia più vasta di amici, perfino fare figli sembrava una tappa obbligata di un viaggio folle; ed era inevitabile, ora lo capiva, che quando non c'erano più stati oggetti da aggiungere o migliorare, né obiettivi da conseguire o fasi da attraversare, il viggio sembrasse concluso, e che lui e sua moglie si sentissero oppressi da un tremendo senso di futilità e da una sensazione di malessere, che in realtà era solo una sensazione di immobilità dopo una vita di eccessivo movimento, la stessa che sperimentano i marinai sulla terraferma dopo essere stati troppo a lungo in mare, invece entrambi l'avevano interpretata come la fine del loro amore. Se avessimo avuto la capacità, ha detto, di riconciliarci con noi stessi, di partire dall'onesta constatazione che non eravamo più innamorati ma tuttavia non volevamo farci del male, ecco, ha detto, di nuovo con gli occhi lucidi, se ci fossimo riusciti credo che avremmo imparato ad amarci davvero e ad amare noi stessi. Invece tutti e due l'abbiamo vista come un'ennesima occasione per muoverci, abbiamo visto il viaggio dispiegarsi di nuovo davanti a noi, solo che stavolta era un viaggio tra le rovine e la guerra, per il quale entrambi abbiamo dimostrato l'energia e la prontezza di sempre.

Tus fracasos nunca dejan de regresar a tu lado, mientras que tus éxitos son algo de lo que siempre tendrás que convencerte.

El éxito te aleja de las cosas que conoces, por lo visto, mientras que el fracaso te condena a ellas.

Supongo, añadí, que esa es una definición del amor, creer en algo que solo dos personas pueden ver.

La personalidad debía adaptarse a las nuevas circunstancias lingüísticas para crearse de nuevo

while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

Parece que o sucesso leva você para longe daquilo que conhece, disse ele, enquanto o fracasso o condena a isso.

Imagino que essa seja uma das definições do amor, falei, a crença em algo que só vocês dois conseguem ver

Ele não olhou para mim nem sequer uma vez, pois os momentos em que as pessoas estão demonstrando o próprio poder sobre as outras são aqueles em que têm menos consciência delas.

Tive a sensação de que poderia nadar quilômetros, até o alto-mar; um desejo de liberdade, um impulso de me mover me puxava como se fosse um fio amarrado no meu peito. Era um impulso que eu conhecia bem, e havia aprendido que não era o chamado de um mundo maior, como eu antes acreditava que fosse. Era simplesmente um desejo de escapar do que eu tinha. O fio não conduzia a lugar nenhum exceto a vastidões de anonimato que não paravam de crescer.

Seu antagonismo tinha a medida exata da sua antiga harmonia, mas enquanto a harmonia havia sido atemporal, sem peso, o antagonismo ocupava espaço e tempo.

Meu filho mais novo, eu lhe contei, tem o hábito muito irritante de ir embora imediatamente do lugar em que você combinou de encontrá-lo caso você não esteja lá quando ele chegar. Em vez de esperar, ele sai à sua procura, e acaba ficando frustrado e perdido. Não encontrei você, lamenta ele depois, invariavelmente perdido. Mas a única esperança de encontrar alguma coisa é ficar exatamente onde se está, no lugar combinado. É apenas uma questão de quanto tempo você consegue aguentar.

Nessas linhas — que segundo o meu vizinho ele recordava até hoje — o tradutor afirma que uma frase nasce para este mundo nem boa, nem ruim, e que estabelecer sua natureza depende dos ajustes mais sutis possíveis, um processo intuitivo em que o exagero e a força são fatais.

É como passar em frente a uma casa onde se morou: o fato de ela ainda existir, tão concreta, faz tudo o que aconteceu desde então parecer de algum modo imaterial.

Apesar disso, falou ele, eu ainda acredito no amor. O amor restaura quase tudo, e quando não consegue restaurar, leva a dor embora.

O que Ryan havia aprendido com isso era que os seus fracassos vivem voltando para você, enquanto os seus sucessos são algo de que você precisa sempre se convencer.

Não ter uma identidade na qual se escorar tornava você um escritor melhor, você via a vida com olhos menos atormentados.

E se tem uma coisa que eu sei é que essa escrita vem da tensão, uma tensão entre o que está dentro e o que está fora.

When peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality. If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

he was observing something while I, evidently, was entirely immersed in being it.

he asks herself whether they are running towards something or away from it. If she looks long enough she sees that they are simply running around in circles.

He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity.

She had sat there, she said, and thought about her own lifelong habit of explaining herself, and she thought about this power of silence, which put people out of one another's reach.

He spoke a refine and formal kind of English, that did not seem wholly natural as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint.

She looks out of the window of her apartment at the women running in the park, always running, and she asks herself whether they are running towards something or away from it. If she looks long enough she sees that they are simply running around in circles.

Wintry Peacock”. It is an autobiographical

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again.

It was with her, after all, that his identity had been forged: if she no longer recognised him, then who was he?

I kept looking for something else, a clue, something rotting or breeding, a layer of mystery or chaos or shame, but I didn’t find it.

What was striking was the sheer negative capability of their former intimacy:

And I realised eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.

As for the weight, he said, you rarely saw yourself with your clothes off, or anyone else without theirs for that matter. He remembered the feeling of estrangement from his own body, as it laboured in the damp, spore-ridden climate of the house; his clogged lungs and itchy skin, his veins full of sugar and fat, his wobbling flesh shrouded in uncomfortable clothing.

suppose it’s a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that’s never repeated. It’s the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground.

The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.

and his wonder at the marks experience has left on her woman’s body.

asked him what it was he was writing, and his smile widened. He said, I am writing about my childhood. I was so happy as a child, he continued, and I realised a little while ago that there was nothing I wanted so much as to recall it piece by piece, with every possible detail.

was very attracted to the hardness of Olga,’ she said, ‘to the hardness of her life. When she spoke about her relationship with her husband it was as though she were speaking about the parts of an engine, explaining how they worked or did not work.

was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them.

There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

This bizarre scene seemed quite acceptable to me, after the awful seaside town and the storm and the mad goats; and in fact one of the things that happened to me on that holiday, and that I believe has not changed since, was that I began to feel for the first time that I was seeing what was really there, without asking myself whether or not I was expecting to see it.

My neighbour was merely a perfectly good example of something about which I could only feel absolute ambivalence.

She herself, she said, had visited the very depths of disillusionment in the male character by being honest in precisely this way: men who had claimed one minute to be dying of love for her were openly insulting her the next, and it was only, in a sense, when she had reached this place of mutual frankness that she could work out who she herself was and what she actually wanted.

she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

it was the thing people feared most of all, when it was their own history that was at risk of being forgotten. And history, really, was invisible, though its monuments still stood.

en egendomlig insikt grep mig, en insikt om existensen som en hemlig smärta, en plåga inombords som omöjligt kunde blottas för andra, som ville att du skulle ägna dig åt dem, omedvetna om vad som rör sig inom dig, likt sjöjungfrun i sagan som går på knivar ingen annan kan se.

When the recorded voice came to the part about the oxygen masks, the hush remained unbroken: no one protested, or spoke up to disagree with this commandment that one should take care of others only after taking care of oneself. Yet I wasn't sure it was altogether true.

...it seems to me as though my wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion.

Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.

Around her throat and wrist she wore several pieces of jewelry and her face was carefully made up, especially around the eyes, which she had outlined dramatically so that they appeared continually startled, as though they were observing things whose intensity and extremity only she could see. After a while I could recognize behind this disguise the timid woman I remembered, and I understood her outfit to be something designed to prevent her from being forgotten or ignored, yet it also had the effect of making her femininity seem a kind of question other people were required to answer or a problem they were expected to solve.

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure.

The sun showed like a scimitar at the edge of the rooftops.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living.

The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate.

the translator says that a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.

He mentioned a scheme he was working on, to eradicate lawyers from people’s personal lives. He was also developing a blueprint for a floating wind farm big enough to accommodate the entire community of people needed to service and run it: the gigantic platform could be located far out to sea, thus removing the unsightly turbines from the stretch of coast where he was hoping to pilot the proposal and where, incidentally, he owned a house. On Sundays he played drums in a rock band, just for fun.

I was finding it difficult to assimilate everything I was being told. The waitresses kept bringing more things, oysters, relishes, special wines. He was easily distracted, like a child with too many Christmas presents. But when he put me in the taxi he said, enjoy yourself in Athens, though I didn’t remember telling him that was where I was going.

He spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint. I asked him what his nationality was. ‘I was sent to an English boarding school at the age of seven,’ he replied. ‘You might say I have the mannerisms of an Englishman but the heart of a Greek. I am told,’ he added, ‘it would be much worse the other way around.