Take a photo of a barcode or cover
The ambush of longing. The stubbornness of desire. Sometimes I think we never stop wanting what we can’t have. 4
I wonder if that’s what drew you here, the sense of living in a place only precariously lodged. Where everything important is hidden below the surface. 5
I had never felt that I fully belonged to India; I only ever lived on its edges. 6
But I didn't say this to you. Instead I asked you where it was in the world that you yourself felt most at home. Was there a particular place, a stretch of coast or view from a window that you had taken into yourself? 6
For so long I felt I contained so little in comparison to your extraordinary interior universe. 6
You wanted me to show myself to you. And I did. From the very first with you it was as if some effort of performance could simply dissolve. I could hold your gaze with an unabashed attention I've never experienced with anyone else in my life. I felt myself to be so clarified, so enlarged in the light of your attention. And someone beyond the person I knew myself to be. Someone wanton and hungry. Desire is like a mirror, you said to me; the really urgent questions it asks us are of ourselves. 8
So many letters, so much talk, everything draped in language, and yet perhaps they were the only times we were truly honest with each other, those hours in bed. 9
[It] is noise. Irregularity. Mad, mad; there is no real word for the love. Love, it will have to be love. 12
How much we simply accept as children until we learn that things should be otherwise. 13
...but I'm not sure I could bear to hear someone else's memories of you. I want you to stay mine. 16
Once again I had the feeling that I had disappointed her in some small but searing way; that I had failed to understand her or respond to her correctly. 17
Who knows what goes on in the caverns of her mind. 18
My life then remained something imagined, something unfurling before me. All my books unwritten. 21
There is so little evidence in the world of what happened between us, Max. 21
Or, later, in hotel rooms. I wonder if the places we have been together remember us, if they hold our presence silently. Some impalpable aura. Something hallowed. 21
You always believed that old photographs have something spectral about them, something enigmatic and mysterious. That they are almost designed to be lost, to come to light accidentally. 22
'Well, I think that as you grow older, vast tracts of your life sort of vanish in oblivion. But that which survives in your mind acquires a considerable degree of density, a high degree of specific weight. And of course, once you are burdened with these kind of weights, it's not unlikely that they will sink you.' 26
But unlike you, Max, I do not have my eye always on the grander sweep of the world's endless catalogue of catastrophes; it's our history that consumes me. 28
What I didn't say to you was that although it was not my country, Rajakkad had always felt to me, in ways that I could barely begin to describe, as if it were my place too. 35
But this was their place, not ours, and sometimes I felt that we lived uneasily on its surface. 37
She lives in a different way to people like you and me, you said. Objects are not imbued with the same kind of enchantment, the same talismanic properties. She does not carry the whole freight of history around with her. She is not a collector, note-taker, a letter writer; not a writer at all. The world is permitted to slip through her fingers unrecorded, unpreserved except in memory. She is wholly devoted to the present, you told me once, as if (63) this was the most miraculous and baffling state of being. 64
It was the same pang of loss I felt once when I realised that in all the years we had known each other you had never made me a cup of tea; would not know how long to steep the leaves for, how much milk to pour. 'But these are not the important things,' you said when I tried to explain it to you. (64) 'Anyone can learn how to make a cup of tea. My secretary knows how I like my tea. You and I know more important things about each other.' 65
I've never let myself describe you. You who have taken up so much of my attention. Sometimes it's hard to believe that I could have fixed you so intently in my mind for so very long. That the sight of you walking towards me could still disassemble me after so many years. A part of me was always waiting for the potency of what was between us to diminish, so that it might be possible for me to leave you. 66
I still have your measurements written on a piece of paper in my diary. The precise span of your shoulders, the length of your arms. The neat row of numbers a clumsy shorthand for the hard swell of your biceps under my fingers, the weight of your chest as you rose above me in bed. It never left me, Max, that surge of longing, not once in all these years. It's become a habit of the body; the same way I never forgot the particular weight of Flora as a baby in my arms. 66
But how should I mourn for you? I have no claim on you. 67
I don't know how to stop talking to you. Half my life I've spent in conversation with you, saving poems or quotes to read (67) to you, writing letters to you. It's become a kind of compulsion and one it seems that even your death cannot cure me of. 68
There was no order to your collection, no real sense or taxonomy. It wasn't even beauty or value or provenance that drew you to some things, thought most of your collection was very beautiful and parts of it valuable. Some things you bought simply because you couldn't beat the thought of them being abandoned. 69
But in those days the hiding, and the being found, were something joyous. 70
At times, Max, I felt you had a hold over me so strong that it threatened to annihilante me. You never wanted deference or devotion, you found the story of the princesses [being burnt with their husband when he died] ghoulish. But there are ways to immolate yourself when you are still alive. 72
The freight of the love I carry for this child will always be shadowed by all the ways I have failed her, the harm done to her that I did not prevent. 83
You bequeathed your attention generously, though seeming to hold back something of yourself - the part of you that watched and observed, that viewed everything with the cold eye of the writer. It was something I recognised in myself too, the urge to scurry back to my bedroom to write things down. 86
(...) would it really have brought her the happiness she though it would? She had fixed her sights so determinedly on that horizon, she could never admit the possibility that it might be a mirage. Or a land very different from the one of her imaginings. 90
II lay there with your hand in mine, as if my touch could heal you, and you held it tightly and talked and talked. How we are wounded into storytelling, how we circle old injuries all our lives. 96
Though Leo has been dead for only only a year our marriage already feels like a mirage I walked through in the desert. 98
I loved being in bed with you, but I missed the world we saw together. 100
Such vast distances between us and yet your voice (104) so close it felt you were there with me, my head resting on your chest. I thought of the great undersea cables connecting us; miraculous, implausible - like love itself. 105
In many ways what we had was a relationship wrought from words, constructed out of imagination and invention, but it was, from the very first, grounded in the flesh. I thought I would have more time with your body. Such pleasures, you and I have had together, and somehow I always imagined there would be more. That there would be more years of exploring the intricate map of you, every line and curve of your body. I loved every change in you (..). as you got older. (...) I would love you still in older age, when your hair grew thinner and your body more vulnerable. I can't imagine a world in which you do not exist. Where, after ever separation, every absence, I know you will take my face between your hands once more and kiss me. 110
We so rarely slept or woke together. Sometimes we dozed for half an hour in the afternoon and I cherished the feeling of drifting off in your arms, of feeling your body loosen. 110
How small we are against the world, and how easily injured. 111
The cups of tea and bowls of soup. A hand on your brow, a blanket for your lap. I wanted to do these things for you. 111
Sylvia was more herself than anyone I knew and yet something about her was not entirely fixed. She was open to the world, to (119) the life-altering force of art or music, or another person. 120
How do we become what we are, Max? Those of us who are not forced into exile, but choose it for ourselves? 120
And me, loving the place I grew up, but with the spectre of England as the true home, the true country, hovering always over me. And then to arrive here at last and find that it wasn't home at all. 121
'I'm not sure,' I said, 'that anyone ever loves the life they imagined.' 121
A rare burst of afternoon sunlight pours through the front windows, flooding the room and giving everything a burnished glow. 124
He described the beauty of the house, which had been in his mother's family for generations, and where he had spent all his childhood summers. 133
Yeats was wrong, the novelist said, pulling on his overcoat, it was not a choice between perfection of the life and perfection of the work; the two were inextricably intertwined. 161
... is this not what we do, all of us who write? Sift through the muck of life for material, transforming and embellishing as we see fit, profiting from the pain of others, from our own pain. 162
We never escape the injuries done to us by history. 163
I began to think that perhaps we could not have anything more than we did. That it was not possible for us to both to feel and fulfill our desires. Perhaps it was only distance and longing that kept us bound together. Did you see it in those terms, Max? Did you ever imagine a real life with me? 164
For most of my life I clung to the belief that I contained some glimmer of greatness. I think all writers - perhaps all artists - must secretly believe this. To carry on through difficulties, we need to sustain the illusion that the work is essential, that we have somehow been marked out to impose our own particular vision on the world. 167
I had the overwhelming feeling that the shell of my self might crack at any moment. That nothing was safe anymore. 167
Hello, darling, you would say when I picked up the phone, and a flood of love and longing would come over me. 168
And me, waiting for your call, your visit, for you to find time. Suspended lives. Do men ever wait like this? I can't imagine it. What if we simply refused to wait anymore, if we turned our backs and walked away into our own lives, leaving you to watch us recede? But to do that I would need to make you less essential to me. And I didn't know, Max, how that was possible. 169
In the late afternoons we lay by the pool, the light around us so thick and golden it felt like a touchable thing. 174
But I did not say this to you. There is much I did not say. 175
Some of the pages were turned down; you always did this to books as a way of flagging a particular line of poem you loved. 176
It was always just you and me, closeted together in our own universe. How well can you know someone in one room, Philip Roth wrote. 180
'All my love,' you signed your letters. But where was that love, Max? What did it mean? 183
Even in the years we did not speak I wrote to you, though I did not send those letters. 188
Proust did warn, after all, that we should be wary of searching for the realities that hide behind our fantasies, the actualities inevitably proving dissatisfying. 189
Of course, this knowledge of Leo was a product of my imagination. I knew him in the way I might claim I knew a character in a well-loved novel, which is to say only as something I had invented, with a few pegs on which to hang my imaginings. 192
"Few buildings, few lives /
Are built so well even their ruins are beautiful."
- María José Navia
'No, don't be sorry. It's so interesting, what lodges in the mind.' 197
To live always between two worlds and destroy your ability to be fully at home in either - it seemed a terrible fate, like a cruel curse of the gods. And yet how many of us live like that. We are exiled, or we exile ourselves, or we simply fail to choose. 198
.. because of course fate resides in Baci wrappers. 204
"Art and love are the same thing. It's the same process of seeing yourself in things that are not you."
- Klosterman
How many afternoons had I left my desk, slipped that coat of the hook in the hallway and walked through the vineyards and fields surrounding the house, my hands thrust deep in my pockets, head down, the dream of the work still strong in me. 207
Despite all the distances and absences between us, I always felt beloved by you. 211
'There's a wonderful quote about translation. It says the beautiful ones are never faithful and the faithful ones are never beautiful.' 215
Faithless quotes
But I could hardly complain, for is this not what we do, all of us who write? Sifting thought the muck of life for material, transforming and embellishing as we see fit, profiting from the pain of others, from our own pain. Not so many years I late I would do the same thing to you Max, after all. 162
We never escape the injuries done to us by history. 163
It was you, Max, who kept me away from other people. I had loved you for nearly all my adult life and that love had slowly begun to alter me. What was between us, provisional and secret as it was, was turning me into someone I had never expected to become. 162
It had never been overtly discussed, but so full of stunned intimacy had the affair been, so engulfing and luminous those weeks in Italy, that she considered the transformation of your relationship into something more permanent was inevitable. 173
In the late afternoon we lay by the pool, the light around us so thick and golden that it felt like a touchable thing. It was miraculous to wake in the night and see you beside me, to stare at your face and watch the rise of your chest as you breathed. To drink coffee with you in the mornings and listen to the fall of the water as you showered. 174
But this I did not say to you. There is so much I did not say. 175
Leo had learned passable Hindi and Nepali from all his years of work in those countries, but he always said he felt himself to be a different person when he spoke them. Not because there was any essential difference, but because it was so much harder for him to bring his true self to the surface in a language that did not belong to him. No matter how fluent he became, the nuances would always elude him. And he could never be funny in any language except English, not even French, which he spoke fairly well. 216
He asked me which language I felt most myself in, and could not think of how to answer him. How much of ourselves are we ever truly able to reveal in any language? In many ways I felt most myself when I was with you, Max, but of course I could not say that to Leo. 216
You did not ask me what I was doing in Bombay and I felt again that little ripple of resentment - that you were not interested in the real shape of my life. As long as I materialised before you, a vision of beauty and charm, you did not really need to know the details. 232
You covered your eyes with your hand for a moment ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m sorry too.’ What clichés we are reduced to. I should have read you a poem, I should have been able to wrap language around all that was happening. But we just sat there, wordless, on the wall by the sea. 234
There was a small prick of resentment in Lucian’s tone during this brief discussion. It was barely perceptible to others, but I saw the swift change in my brother’s internal weather. He had never liked to be criticised. 245
… I realised that U need to write about you. I stood up, walked back to the hotel and opened a page of my notebook.
It was you, Max, after all, who said that works of literature are like crystallised twigs, hardened remains of our former lives. 257
Or perhaps not anger exactly, but more of a wonder bitterness, for what is anger ever really but pain? 257
‘No,’ Sylvia said. ‘In the catalogue of life’s experiences, it’s not one that I regret.’ 263
It had baffled you, this insistence on living in the present. It was you, after all, who once wrote that the appointments we have to keep in the past are just as important as those we might have in the future. 264
… every attempt to understand someone else is full of occlusions. That every life is essentially unknowable. 265
If only all difficult knowledge came to us aslant, could be tempered and gently told. 268
I wanted whatever sorrows she had to be ordinary ones 269
I wonder if that’s what drew you here, the sense of living in a place only precariously lodged. Where everything important is hidden below the surface. 5
I had never felt that I fully belonged to India; I only ever lived on its edges. 6
But I didn't say this to you. Instead I asked you where it was in the world that you yourself felt most at home. Was there a particular place, a stretch of coast or view from a window that you had taken into yourself? 6
For so long I felt I contained so little in comparison to your extraordinary interior universe. 6
You wanted me to show myself to you. And I did. From the very first with you it was as if some effort of performance could simply dissolve. I could hold your gaze with an unabashed attention I've never experienced with anyone else in my life. I felt myself to be so clarified, so enlarged in the light of your attention. And someone beyond the person I knew myself to be. Someone wanton and hungry. Desire is like a mirror, you said to me; the really urgent questions it asks us are of ourselves. 8
So many letters, so much talk, everything draped in language, and yet perhaps they were the only times we were truly honest with each other, those hours in bed. 9
[It] is noise. Irregularity. Mad, mad; there is no real word for the love. Love, it will have to be love. 12
How much we simply accept as children until we learn that things should be otherwise. 13
...but I'm not sure I could bear to hear someone else's memories of you. I want you to stay mine. 16
Once again I had the feeling that I had disappointed her in some small but searing way; that I had failed to understand her or respond to her correctly. 17
Who knows what goes on in the caverns of her mind. 18
My life then remained something imagined, something unfurling before me. All my books unwritten. 21
There is so little evidence in the world of what happened between us, Max. 21
Or, later, in hotel rooms. I wonder if the places we have been together remember us, if they hold our presence silently. Some impalpable aura. Something hallowed. 21
You always believed that old photographs have something spectral about them, something enigmatic and mysterious. That they are almost designed to be lost, to come to light accidentally. 22
'Well, I think that as you grow older, vast tracts of your life sort of vanish in oblivion. But that which survives in your mind acquires a considerable degree of density, a high degree of specific weight. And of course, once you are burdened with these kind of weights, it's not unlikely that they will sink you.' 26
But unlike you, Max, I do not have my eye always on the grander sweep of the world's endless catalogue of catastrophes; it's our history that consumes me. 28
What I didn't say to you was that although it was not my country, Rajakkad had always felt to me, in ways that I could barely begin to describe, as if it were my place too. 35
But this was their place, not ours, and sometimes I felt that we lived uneasily on its surface. 37
She lives in a different way to people like you and me, you said. Objects are not imbued with the same kind of enchantment, the same talismanic properties. She does not carry the whole freight of history around with her. She is not a collector, note-taker, a letter writer; not a writer at all. The world is permitted to slip through her fingers unrecorded, unpreserved except in memory. She is wholly devoted to the present, you told me once, as if (63) this was the most miraculous and baffling state of being. 64
It was the same pang of loss I felt once when I realised that in all the years we had known each other you had never made me a cup of tea; would not know how long to steep the leaves for, how much milk to pour. 'But these are not the important things,' you said when I tried to explain it to you. (64) 'Anyone can learn how to make a cup of tea. My secretary knows how I like my tea. You and I know more important things about each other.' 65
I've never let myself describe you. You who have taken up so much of my attention. Sometimes it's hard to believe that I could have fixed you so intently in my mind for so very long. That the sight of you walking towards me could still disassemble me after so many years. A part of me was always waiting for the potency of what was between us to diminish, so that it might be possible for me to leave you. 66
I still have your measurements written on a piece of paper in my diary. The precise span of your shoulders, the length of your arms. The neat row of numbers a clumsy shorthand for the hard swell of your biceps under my fingers, the weight of your chest as you rose above me in bed. It never left me, Max, that surge of longing, not once in all these years. It's become a habit of the body; the same way I never forgot the particular weight of Flora as a baby in my arms. 66
But how should I mourn for you? I have no claim on you. 67
I don't know how to stop talking to you. Half my life I've spent in conversation with you, saving poems or quotes to read (67) to you, writing letters to you. It's become a kind of compulsion and one it seems that even your death cannot cure me of. 68
There was no order to your collection, no real sense or taxonomy. It wasn't even beauty or value or provenance that drew you to some things, thought most of your collection was very beautiful and parts of it valuable. Some things you bought simply because you couldn't beat the thought of them being abandoned. 69
But in those days the hiding, and the being found, were something joyous. 70
At times, Max, I felt you had a hold over me so strong that it threatened to annihilante me. You never wanted deference or devotion, you found the story of the princesses [being burnt with their husband when he died] ghoulish. But there are ways to immolate yourself when you are still alive. 72
The freight of the love I carry for this child will always be shadowed by all the ways I have failed her, the harm done to her that I did not prevent. 83
You bequeathed your attention generously, though seeming to hold back something of yourself - the part of you that watched and observed, that viewed everything with the cold eye of the writer. It was something I recognised in myself too, the urge to scurry back to my bedroom to write things down. 86
(...) would it really have brought her the happiness she though it would? She had fixed her sights so determinedly on that horizon, she could never admit the possibility that it might be a mirage. Or a land very different from the one of her imaginings. 90
II lay there with your hand in mine, as if my touch could heal you, and you held it tightly and talked and talked. How we are wounded into storytelling, how we circle old injuries all our lives. 96
Though Leo has been dead for only only a year our marriage already feels like a mirage I walked through in the desert. 98
I loved being in bed with you, but I missed the world we saw together. 100
Such vast distances between us and yet your voice (104) so close it felt you were there with me, my head resting on your chest. I thought of the great undersea cables connecting us; miraculous, implausible - like love itself. 105
In many ways what we had was a relationship wrought from words, constructed out of imagination and invention, but it was, from the very first, grounded in the flesh. I thought I would have more time with your body. Such pleasures, you and I have had together, and somehow I always imagined there would be more. That there would be more years of exploring the intricate map of you, every line and curve of your body. I loved every change in you (..). as you got older. (...) I would love you still in older age, when your hair grew thinner and your body more vulnerable. I can't imagine a world in which you do not exist. Where, after ever separation, every absence, I know you will take my face between your hands once more and kiss me. 110
We so rarely slept or woke together. Sometimes we dozed for half an hour in the afternoon and I cherished the feeling of drifting off in your arms, of feeling your body loosen. 110
How small we are against the world, and how easily injured. 111
The cups of tea and bowls of soup. A hand on your brow, a blanket for your lap. I wanted to do these things for you. 111
Sylvia was more herself than anyone I knew and yet something about her was not entirely fixed. She was open to the world, to (119) the life-altering force of art or music, or another person. 120
How do we become what we are, Max? Those of us who are not forced into exile, but choose it for ourselves? 120
And me, loving the place I grew up, but with the spectre of England as the true home, the true country, hovering always over me. And then to arrive here at last and find that it wasn't home at all. 121
'I'm not sure,' I said, 'that anyone ever loves the life they imagined.' 121
A rare burst of afternoon sunlight pours through the front windows, flooding the room and giving everything a burnished glow. 124
He described the beauty of the house, which had been in his mother's family for generations, and where he had spent all his childhood summers. 133
Yeats was wrong, the novelist said, pulling on his overcoat, it was not a choice between perfection of the life and perfection of the work; the two were inextricably intertwined. 161
... is this not what we do, all of us who write? Sift through the muck of life for material, transforming and embellishing as we see fit, profiting from the pain of others, from our own pain. 162
We never escape the injuries done to us by history. 163
I began to think that perhaps we could not have anything more than we did. That it was not possible for us to both to feel and fulfill our desires. Perhaps it was only distance and longing that kept us bound together. Did you see it in those terms, Max? Did you ever imagine a real life with me? 164
For most of my life I clung to the belief that I contained some glimmer of greatness. I think all writers - perhaps all artists - must secretly believe this. To carry on through difficulties, we need to sustain the illusion that the work is essential, that we have somehow been marked out to impose our own particular vision on the world. 167
I had the overwhelming feeling that the shell of my self might crack at any moment. That nothing was safe anymore. 167
Hello, darling, you would say when I picked up the phone, and a flood of love and longing would come over me. 168
And me, waiting for your call, your visit, for you to find time. Suspended lives. Do men ever wait like this? I can't imagine it. What if we simply refused to wait anymore, if we turned our backs and walked away into our own lives, leaving you to watch us recede? But to do that I would need to make you less essential to me. And I didn't know, Max, how that was possible. 169
In the late afternoons we lay by the pool, the light around us so thick and golden it felt like a touchable thing. 174
But I did not say this to you. There is much I did not say. 175
Some of the pages were turned down; you always did this to books as a way of flagging a particular line of poem you loved. 176
It was always just you and me, closeted together in our own universe. How well can you know someone in one room, Philip Roth wrote. 180
'All my love,' you signed your letters. But where was that love, Max? What did it mean? 183
Even in the years we did not speak I wrote to you, though I did not send those letters. 188
Proust did warn, after all, that we should be wary of searching for the realities that hide behind our fantasies, the actualities inevitably proving dissatisfying. 189
Of course, this knowledge of Leo was a product of my imagination. I knew him in the way I might claim I knew a character in a well-loved novel, which is to say only as something I had invented, with a few pegs on which to hang my imaginings. 192
"Few buildings, few lives /
Are built so well even their ruins are beautiful."
- María José Navia
'No, don't be sorry. It's so interesting, what lodges in the mind.' 197
To live always between two worlds and destroy your ability to be fully at home in either - it seemed a terrible fate, like a cruel curse of the gods. And yet how many of us live like that. We are exiled, or we exile ourselves, or we simply fail to choose. 198
.. because of course fate resides in Baci wrappers. 204
"Art and love are the same thing. It's the same process of seeing yourself in things that are not you."
- Klosterman
How many afternoons had I left my desk, slipped that coat of the hook in the hallway and walked through the vineyards and fields surrounding the house, my hands thrust deep in my pockets, head down, the dream of the work still strong in me. 207
Despite all the distances and absences between us, I always felt beloved by you. 211
'There's a wonderful quote about translation. It says the beautiful ones are never faithful and the faithful ones are never beautiful.' 215
Faithless quotes
But I could hardly complain, for is this not what we do, all of us who write? Sifting thought the muck of life for material, transforming and embellishing as we see fit, profiting from the pain of others, from our own pain. Not so many years I late I would do the same thing to you Max, after all. 162
We never escape the injuries done to us by history. 163
It was you, Max, who kept me away from other people. I had loved you for nearly all my adult life and that love had slowly begun to alter me. What was between us, provisional and secret as it was, was turning me into someone I had never expected to become. 162
It had never been overtly discussed, but so full of stunned intimacy had the affair been, so engulfing and luminous those weeks in Italy, that she considered the transformation of your relationship into something more permanent was inevitable. 173
In the late afternoon we lay by the pool, the light around us so thick and golden that it felt like a touchable thing. It was miraculous to wake in the night and see you beside me, to stare at your face and watch the rise of your chest as you breathed. To drink coffee with you in the mornings and listen to the fall of the water as you showered. 174
But this I did not say to you. There is so much I did not say. 175
Leo had learned passable Hindi and Nepali from all his years of work in those countries, but he always said he felt himself to be a different person when he spoke them. Not because there was any essential difference, but because it was so much harder for him to bring his true self to the surface in a language that did not belong to him. No matter how fluent he became, the nuances would always elude him. And he could never be funny in any language except English, not even French, which he spoke fairly well. 216
He asked me which language I felt most myself in, and could not think of how to answer him. How much of ourselves are we ever truly able to reveal in any language? In many ways I felt most myself when I was with you, Max, but of course I could not say that to Leo. 216
You did not ask me what I was doing in Bombay and I felt again that little ripple of resentment - that you were not interested in the real shape of my life. As long as I materialised before you, a vision of beauty and charm, you did not really need to know the details. 232
You covered your eyes with your hand for a moment ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m sorry too.’ What clichés we are reduced to. I should have read you a poem, I should have been able to wrap language around all that was happening. But we just sat there, wordless, on the wall by the sea. 234
There was a small prick of resentment in Lucian’s tone during this brief discussion. It was barely perceptible to others, but I saw the swift change in my brother’s internal weather. He had never liked to be criticised. 245
… I realised that U need to write about you. I stood up, walked back to the hotel and opened a page of my notebook.
It was you, Max, after all, who said that works of literature are like crystallised twigs, hardened remains of our former lives. 257
Or perhaps not anger exactly, but more of a wonder bitterness, for what is anger ever really but pain? 257
‘No,’ Sylvia said. ‘In the catalogue of life’s experiences, it’s not one that I regret.’ 263
It had baffled you, this insistence on living in the present. It was you, after all, who once wrote that the appointments we have to keep in the past are just as important as those we might have in the future. 264
… every attempt to understand someone else is full of occlusions. That every life is essentially unknowable. 265
If only all difficult knowledge came to us aslant, could be tempered and gently told. 268
I wanted whatever sorrows she had to be ordinary ones 269