All is lost, everything is ruined. It’s ten past three.
“I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again."
“Age, gender and nature of bodily harm: please, do tell.”
"Eternal, only, almighty, our God, fix Your gaze upon my parents. See them in their need. Do not turn Your eyes from them."
"No one comes back from Vietnam: that, once you’ve been there, return is impossible."
"Don’t have any, because you’ll regret it; although if you don’t have any, you’ll regret that too."
"All love stories are absurd because love is an illness that only time can cure; but having a child is risking a love so absurd that only death can end it.”
[a café]…converted into one of those interchangeable cafes that American snobs consider European (from Rome) and European snobs consider American (from New York), but which are impossible to find in either New York or Rome.
There are all kinds of bolt-holes. Some have the smell of whisky, eau de Cologne, a woman and the sounds of gramophone records…
But it fell back again weakly, gnarled, calloused, spotted with small blue dots which must have been the vestiges of old tattoos.
He cycled over 50 kilometres without once stopping for a beer.
Imagine growing up as a young atheist in a stiflingly Catholic
country. Imagine migrating to London, the Babylon of 'really existing
atheism'. Imagine the expectations.
When I first set foot on the cold, secular ground of the metropolis,
I felt that I couldn't have asked for more. A few empty churches,
scattered here and there. No Vatican City, no Pope. Charles
Darwin's face on banknotes. I could finally breathe freely.
Yet I realised quickly that something wasn't right. Somehow, the
smell of religion still lingered in the air, as sickening as always. I
found it on the trains coming back home from the office, filled
with exhausted workers. I smelt it on the benches on a Monday
afternoon, covered with the beer cans of the unemployed. Most of
all, I felt it surrounding me when I walked into the office every
morning, finding my colleagues already there, frantically typing
on their keyboards as if fiddling with digital rosaries. I had
walked in perfectly on time, why was everybody there already?
Why did they look so satisfied when they greeted me from their
desks? They were working hard, harder than they were expected
to. And in the evening, when the darkness of Northern Europe
enveloped the office blocks and young professionals' houses,
they were still at their desks, typing as fast as greyhounds race.
Looking at me packing up, as if I had been a weak opponent
abandoning the match before time. Why did they keep working
late, when no pay or praise was ever to be awarded to them by
anybody? What did they find in their silent, tragic sacrifice?
Once again I was surrounded by that smell. The same smell that
filled the churches of my childhood on a Sunday morning. It had
spread everywhere. Not just in churches, but all around the
office blocks. Not just confined to one day a week, but every day
- eight, nine ten hours a day. No longer accompanied by the
chanting of monks, but by the clicking march of a million ants on
the keyboard of one, immense metropolitan organ.
Religion had never left. I had never managed to escape it. Its
name had changed, but its believers remained the same. They
were just a little more honest, a little more self-sacrificing than
the old Catholics back at home. Possibly, a little more fanatical.
Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out.
The installation was intended to hasten Kurt's editing of The Walk by stimulating gamma waves, but it had taken several months of trial and error to sync the correct tracks with patterns in cloud coverage and atmospheric pressure, a process that had creatively derailed Kurt to the point that his meditation counselor, Yuri, suggested Kurt spend some time doing something repetitive and therapeutic to allow the psychological impact of the installation to set in so Kurt spent months constantly knitting, creating yards-long scarves and hats that grew wider and wider until they had no recogniseable use.
How sad our respective nothings had seemed at first, the cool absence in a bed, the dinners with a book. Then, even sadder, those nothings became preferable. The simplicity of being alone won out over the complexity of being together.
She did miss the comfort of his life drifting beside hers. She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.
Of course, it was just her job to care, to listen, and she was merely participating in the worldwide tradition f dreading one's work, but she felt a new difficulty in getting herself to cooperate, to go along with it all.
