"Lessons"

Ian McEwan wrote about Roland's victimhood by two women with great nuance; the other aspects of his life was well-examined as well, against various historical backdrops.

• He could not conceive that someone had once troubled to write it. The music was simply here, a school thing, or dark, like a pine forest in winter, exclusive to him, his private labyrinth of cold sorrow. It would never let him leave.
• Her perfume overwhelmed his senses and deafened him. It was a rounded cloying scent, like a hard object, a smooth river stone, pushing in on his thoughts. Three years later he learned it was rosewater.
• He could see the bad place on the page before he reached it, it was happening before it happened, the mistake was coming towards him, arms outstretched like a mother, ready to scoop him up, always the same mistake coming to collect him without the promise of a kiss. And so it happened.
• He hesitated before yet another of those blinding encounters with the ways of adults. They never told you what they knew. They concealed from you the boundaries of your ignorance.
• He stopped. The lingering discord sounded like his name spoken out loud.
• Here his memories faded into dreaming. He went closer, closer, through the glistening universe to a view from a mountain summit above a distant ocean like the one fatty Cortés saw in a poem the whole class wrote out twenty-five times for a detention. A sea of writhing creatures, smaller than tadpoles, millions on millions, packed to the curved horizon... As he entered through thick blood-red curtains there came from a distance a howl then a sunburst of a crying baby’s face.
• If he had been a misguided child to feel that then, why indulge the guilty feeling now? Blame her, not himself. He came to know her postcards and her note by heart. By convention, such notes were left on the kitchen table. She had left hers on his pillow, like a hotel’s bitter chocolate.
• It hardened with each finger of Scotch. Another invisible finger that beckoned. He hated her progressively and every thought was a repeat, a variation on the theme of her self-loving desertion.
• It was a kind of strength, a murmur of excitement in his chest, to pretend to her that he had practised for three hours during the week.
• he was already clear, on the other side, moving smoothly across the level ground above the forest where the light and space were cleaner, and for a stretch he thought he could discern the hint of a melody suspended like a joke above his steady march of sounds.
• Roland was well disposed towards the collapsed face, its soft hangdog look of infinite wear and tear.
• The self-made hell was an interesting construct. Nobody escaped making one, at least one, in a lifetime. Some lives were nothing but. It was a tautology that self-inflicted misery was an extension of character. But Roland often thought about it. You built a torture machine and climbed inside. Perfect fit, with a range of pain on offer:... An entire political system could opt for self-imposed distress—he had once spent some time in East Berlin.
• the untidy unwashed feeling of being a suspect
• To follow the obscure trail of an exquisite idea that could lead to a lucky narrowing, to a fiery point, a sudden focus of pure light to illuminate a first line that would hold the secret key to the lines that must follow.
• But his father’s closed eyes suggested to Lawrence a universe shrinking into frozen darkness, leaving him the last remaining being, chilled and rejected on a vacated shore. He inhaled deeply and howled, a piteous piercing wail of abandonment and despair. For speechless helpless humans, much power lay in a violent switch of extreme emotions. A crude mode of tyranny. Real-world tyrants were often compared to infants. Were Lawrence’s joys and sorrow separated by the finest gauze? Not even that. They were wrapped up tight together.
• In an understated way—it had to be understated because he didn’t know enough—it was about the Troubles.
• He was forced to read himself through another’s eyes and struggle against a likely misreading. Self-consciousness was the death of a notebook.
• While he waited by the till for the flowers to be wrapped he wondered how it was possible to know something, if only in vaguest terms, and at the same time deny it, refuse it, steer round it, then experience the luxury of shock at the moment of revelation.
• What was good for a politician’s idea of the masses might not be good for any individual, especially for him. But he was the mass. He would be treated like the idiot he always was.
• “Meltdown!” The entire story, the accumulated details, were beginning to nauseate him. Like eating too much cake.
• Roland noted the heavy iron drains in the unlittered cobbled gutters. So much work to make a few yards of ordinary street, and no one noticed.
• By now, there was a crowd. Captain Baines was not alone—all the men, except the youngest, had been in the war and knew what to do, Roland thought. The car’s front doors were open and three men were leaning in.
• how loving and good people were, how kind the world was that had ambulances in it that came quickly out of nowhere whenever there was sorrow and pain. Always there, an entire system, just below the surface of everyday life, watchfully waiting, ready with all its knowledge and skill to come and help, embedded within a greater network of kindness he had yet to discover.
• Fewer knew of the British army contingent there, a remnant of the vast sweeping desert campaigns of the Second World War. In international politics Libya was a backwater. For six years the Baines family made a life in an obscure crevice of history.
• Robert and Rosalind wanted for Roland the education they had been denied. This was the story she told herself. That he might have attended a day school and stayed with her was an idea she must have dutifully banished.
• This was the first time that remote turns in international events intruded on his small world. His understanding of them was minimal. He would learn in his next school that arguments among the Greek gods had serious consequences for mere humans below.
• for his euphoria in those few days. The rupture of routine, the excitement of danger mixed with an exaggerated sense of security, hours of unsupervised play with his chums; and then, a set of absences: squinting at the blackboard at the Azizia school, release from his mother’s anxious attention and sadness and from his father’s iron authority.
• The episode, a taste of unreal freedom, had lasted eight days. It sustained him at boarding school, it shaped his restlessness and unfocussed ambitions in his twenties and strengthened his resistance to a regular job. .. He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him step through into a paradise regained. There his purpose, his delight in friendship and community and the thrill of the unexpected would be bound and resolved. Because he failed to understand or define these expectations until after they had faded in later life, he was vulnerable to their appeal. He did not know what—in the real world—he was waiting for. In the dimensions of the unreal, it was to relive the eight days he spent in the confines of 10 Armoured Workshops, REME, at Gurji camp in the autumn of 1956.
• The immediate assault was on the nature of time. It would have happened anyway. It had to happen, the transition into adult time and obligation. Before, he had flourished in a barely visible mist of events, careless of their sequence, drifting, at worst stumbling, through the hours, days and weeks. Birthdays and Christmas were the only true markers. Time was what you received.
• Possessions consorted tyrannically with time. They could disappear at the ends of your fingers. There were many things you were likely to lose or forget to bring at the start of the day—the timetable itself, a textbook, last night’s prep, other exercise books, printed questionnaires and maps, a pen that didn’t leak, a bottle of ink, pencil, ruler, protractor, compass, slide rule. If you kept all these small things in a case, you could lose that too and be in bigger trouble.
• Time, which had been an unbounded sphere in which he moved freely in all directions, became overnight a narrow one-way track down which he travelled with his new friends from lesson to lesson, week to week until it became an unquestioned reality.
• Even though it had ended fourteen years ago—his entire lifetime plus almost a quarter—the world war remained a presence, a shadow, but also a light, the source of virtue and meaning,
• Suddenly every separate leaf of the many thousands that covered the tree resolved into a brilliant singularity of colour and form and glittering movement in the slight breeze, each leaf a subtle variation of red, orange, gold, pale yellow and lingering green against a deep blue sky. The tree, like the scores around it, had made a portion of the rainbow its own. The oak was an intricate giant being that knew itself.
• But by the time he was thirteen, Miss Cornell had driven them out. She stood alone on stage in the theatre of his dreams to supervise with her indifferent gaze his first orgasm.
• Peter Mount, who then worked for the national electricity grid and knew about power distribution, thought for a moment and said that uselessness had never got in the way of war.
• PA counted down from ten, to the moment when millions rose from their sofas to power up their kettles for tea. Zero. Two hands on a heavy black lever pulled down hard. Megawatts were flushed at the speed of light along cables below the English Channel, purchased from the uncomprehending French—what was Coronation Street?
• the burdens of ordinary life, the regrettable miracle of Lawrence’s existence, the ordinary fact of a less than brilliant husband.
• There was nothing in any account that could ever satisfy him. It was not a matter of accuracy. It pained him that what had been a lived experience was now an idea, a hazy notion in the minds of strangers.
• Two-thirds of this city were a ruin. But there were pockets of innocent normality where bombs had not fallen.
• Nothing is so dishonourable in a civilised nation…It was as if I was reading a translation from the Latin of a venerable figure of antiquity…this opening declaration on such a grand note, written by a man, a student, still in his mid-twenties, with a passion for intellectual freedom and his sure sense of a precious artistic, philosophical and religious tradition under threat of annihilation. I felt a thrill, a sort of swoon…it was like falling in love…Hans Scholl, his sister Sophie and their friends, almost alone in the nation, raising their tiny voices against a tyranny, not in the name of politics but of civilisation itself. Now they were dead. Three years dead and I grieved for them on a corner on Ludwigstraße. I so much wanted to know them, to have them here with me now. I walked back to the hotel full of sadness, like a bereaved lover.
• The White Rose became the staple of the classroom, of bad poetry, of easy sentiment and sanctity, of dramatic movies and solemn children’s books, endless scholarship and a cascade of doctoral theses. It was the story post-war Germany required as a founding narrative of the new federal state. It became a shining tale so well worn, so emphatically embraced by officialdom that in later years it would provoke cynicism or worse.
• He knew he was capable of projection in this period of his life, but this feline wail sounded to him like despair. What must it be, to burst out of deep infant sleep into the shocking singular fact of existence. Everything unknown about the world, little to know it with. In that thin tapering sound, utter loneliness.
• Then what? Then…Whenever he reached this point there lay like a fog across his future the quotidian struggle with parenting and fatigue. There could be no conceivable plan, no uplift, when all he could do was stay close to the ground, keep going, keep Lawrence going, keep tending him and playing with him and taking the state support, then housework, cooking, shopping. The common tightly encircled fate of single mothers was his.
• when one’s parents set off on their downhill journey. Up until that time they had owned whoever they were, whatever they did. Now, little bits of their lives were beginning to fall away or fly off suddenly like the shattered wing mirror from the Major’s car. Then larger parts came away and needed to be gathered or caught mid-air by their children.
• No one went to jail for modernism, for non-representational colours. His generation was also more fortunate than the one that followed. His lot lolled on history’s aproned lap, nestling in a little fold of time, eating all the cream. Roland had had the historical luck and all the chances. But here he was, broke in a time when the kindly state had become a shrew.
• The Greeks were right to invent their gods as argumentative unpredictable punitive members of a lofty elite. If he could believe in such all-too-human gods they would be the ones to fear.
• In your mid-thirties you could begin to ask what kind of person you were. The first long run of turbulent young adulthood was over. So too was excusing yourself by reference to your background. Insufficient parents? A lack of love? Too much of it? Enough, no more excuses. You had friends of a dozen years or more. You could see your reflection in their eyes. You could or should have been in and out of love. You would have spent useful time alone. You had a measure of public life and your relation to it. Your responsibilities would be pressing in, helping to define you.
• Age and its regrets, its vanished youth and banished expectations—just steps away. He turned to the Author’s Note. Yes, “Youth” was a “record of experience, but that experience, in its facts, in its inwardness and in its outward colouring, begins and ends in myself.”
• What hope then for a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, living in a time and culture and crowded circumstances that did not encourage self-knowledge or even know about it?
• Many years later Roland heard the four-year-old daughter of a friend declare to her father, “I’m unhappy.” Simple, honest, obvious and necessary. No such sentence was ever spoken by Roland as a child.
• His school, like most, was held together by a hierarchy of privileges, infinitesimally graded and slowly bestowed over the years. It made the older boys conservative guardians of the existing order, jealous of the rights they had earned with such patience.
• Like any social order, it seemed to all but revolutionary spirits to be at one with the fabric of reality.
• In that time, moral standards were high in public life and so, therefore, was hypocrisy. Delicious outrage was the general tone. Scandals became part of the anecdotage of their sex education... Even the Telegraph carried photographs of smiling girls in the news with bouffant hair and eyelashes as thick and dark as prison bars.
• At fourteen they were newly launched on splendid truculent revolt. It was liberating to be or feel loutish. Satire, parody, mockery were their modes, ludicrous renderings of authority’s voice and stock phrases. They were scathing, merciless with each other too, even as they were loyal.
• He relaxed a little when she almost fumbled over a run of notes, a private game of mischievous Mozart. But the movement seemed to last hours and at the end the black dots that signalled a repeat were a punishment, a repeat jail sentence.
• Suddenly she pushed the bed covers away and rolled on top of him, sat up—and it was complete, accomplished. So simple. Like some trick with a vanishing knot in a length of soft rope. He lay back in sensual wonder... It seemed as if he had been shown a hidden fold in space where there was a catch, a fastener, and that as he released it and peeled away the illusory everyday he saw what had always been there. Their roles, teacher, pupil, the order and self-importance of school, timetables, bikes, cars, clothes, even words—all of it a diversion to keep everyone from this. It was either hilarious or it was tragic, that people should go about their daily business in the conventional way when they knew there was this. Even the headmaster, who had a son and a daughter, must know. Even the Queen. Every adult knew. What a facade. What pretence.
• He felt trapped, bewildered, and at the same time he felt he owed her a great debt. Of course, it would have been wrong, appalling bad manners to leave. But even if it had been right he would not have known how to withstand her.
• Obeying her was the toll he paid. Besides, she outmanoeuvred him, she could frighten him with a rapid shift of mood. Dissent, and especially disobedience, could provoke her instantly. The obliterating tenderness would be withdrawn.
• It was a genuine question. He said, “It’s a present.”
    “Is your severed head in here? Am I meant to be pining away for you?”
    His look was blank. “I don’t think so.”
    “You don’t know Keats’s poem, ‘The Pot of Basil’? Isabella?”
• She drew him closer to her and kissed his nose and said, “We’ve got a lot of work to do on you.” <> That was it, and that was how it was going to be. This was what the far-off belligerent gods, Khrushchev and Kennedy, had arranged for him.
• He was too young to know about possession, to understand that his interest in jazz had threatened to remove him from her sphere of command. At fourteen, how was he to know that, at twenty-five, she too was young? Her cleverness, her love and knowledge of music, literature, her liveliness and charm when he was securely hers masked her desperation.
• Here was yet another if–then. If Colonel Nasser had not nationalised the Suez Canal, and if British elites were not still immersed in dreams of empire and determined to take back their short cut to the Far East, then Roland would not have spent a rapturous week of play in a military camp. Though his wild travels were over, a notion of impossible freedom and adventure still spoiled him for the present where most of life's satisfactions were located. It was a habit of mind. His real life, the boundless life, was elsewhere.
• He knew that life at its best was rich and plural, obligations were inevitable, it was impossible to live only in and for blanketing ecstasy. That he had to tell himself this proved to Roland how lost he was...  Later, parenting, its double helix of love and labour, should have delivered him. In the actual world, he was delivered.
• “Something like, you long to make love night and day? So do we all. It can’t happen. It’s the price we pay for order in the streets. Freud knew that. So grow up!” <> Dead right, and they laughed. But in his teens Roland had already read Civilisation and Its Discontents. It hadn’t helped.
• The guard took the open passport. He was about Roland’s age, Florian and Ruth’s age, thirty or so. His uniform looked tight and cheap, a pretence, like his regulation stern manner. A chorus member of a low-cost modern-costume opera... Roland wondered at the chasm, the wall that divided himself and this man who, in another dispensation, could have been a tennis partner, a neighbour, a distant cousin. What lay between them was a vast and invisible network—its interlacing origins mostly forgotten—of invention and belief, military defeats, occupation and historical accident.
• He found Ruth’s and Florian’s lives hard to describe. Economically pinched, generally constrained, wary rather than fearful, but warmly domestic and fierce in their friendships and loyalties. Once you had children, Ruth told Roland, you were bound to the system.
• But how did the atrocities of Vietnam make Soviet Communism more loveable? he kept asking. The answer was clear. In the bipolar Cold War, communism was the lesser of two evils. To attack it was to sustain the grisly project of capitalism and US imperialism.
• He found the town in his atlas and stared at the little black dot until it began to pulse. In a twenty-five-minute conversation, Roland thought, they had measured the moral circumference of the German Democratic Republic through the journey of one family. From catastrophe to mere bleakness. Schwedt.
• Their conversations, even this one, were interludes rather than journeys in themselves. That the emotional bond between them remained frail was one part of the excitement. It was thrilling to be strangers or, as gradually happened, to pretend to be.
• I’m rootless. In our household there were no beliefs, no principles, there were no ideas that were valued. Because my father had none. Army drill and standing orders, regulations instead of morals.
• Alissa said, “We have to forgive the fathers or we’ll go mad. But first we have to remember what they did.”
• He was beginning to think he’d been overplaying his reactions to the policeman, whipping himself up. No need. This was farce. Around him was the fortress wall of his innocence. The street-level forces of law and order were long ago typed into the culture as Shakespeare’s Dogberry. This visit would be an exquisite tale, one that Roland would work up and tell, as he had before.
• One evening he read “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat.” It was like bursting through a screen. Lawrence instantly wanted it again. Then again. He was right. This was the pure poetry of nonsense. A beautiful impossible adventure.
• To have money! Why had no one told him, it was a physical thing? He felt it in his arms and legs. Especially in his neck and shoulders. Mortgage paid off, son brightly clothed
• He knew it could be pleasurable, handing out wise counsel. Receiving it could be suffocating when you’ve moved on. Where exactly? Backwards, twenty-seven years, to the core. Alissa’s vanishing had left open ground to the past. Like trees felled to clear the view.
• “She said, ‘Mutti, I grew up in the shadow, the chill of your disappointment. My whole childhood was lived around your sense of failure. Your bitterness. You didn’t become a writer... But you barely tolerated it, this second-rate life.
• She too deceived herself in marriage. She thought you were a brilliant bohemian. Your piano playing seduced her. She thought you were a free spirit. Just the way I thought Heinrich was a hero of the resistance and would go on being one.
• Some part of the history of the divided city, of the divided world, was his. In the crossings he had made in the late seventies, he never could have imagined a scene like this, one of such boundless significance and symbolic weight—and yet it was in the hands of beneficent crowds. They—he—were making the moment. To be standing here, treading this forbidden militarised space was as extraordinary as standing on the moon.
• He sounded feeble in his own ears when at last he said, “What incredible events.” The end of the Cold War was their small talk.
• He saw it clearly—Russia, a liberal democracy, unfolding like a flower in spring. Nuclear weapons negotiated downwards to extinction. Then mega-tides of spare cash and good intentions flowing like fresh water, cleansing the dirt of every social problem. The general well-being refreshed, schools, hospitals, cities renewed. Tyrannies dissolving across the South American continent, the Amazon rainforests rescued and treasured—let poverty be razed instead of trees. For millions, time for music, dancing, art and celebration. Mrs. Thatcher had demonstrated it at the UN—the political right had finally understood climate change and believed in action while there was time... Berlin, Roland saw clearly, had sustained him back in the seventies and today gave him a perspective on the petty sorrows and indignities of his personal life.
• Ah, the great consumer marketplace of self-realisation, whose lethal enemy was the selfishly mewling baby in league with the husband and his absurd requests.
• The prose was beautiful, crisp, artful, the tone from the first lines had authority and intelligence. The eye was exact, unforgiving, compassionate. In some of the starkest scenes there was a near-comic sense of both human inadequacy and courage. There were paragraphs that rose from Catherine’s limited perspective to provide a broad historical awareness—destiny, catastrophe, hope, uncertainty.
• He must forgive her for writing well. As unbearable as not forgiving her. Had she not been self-serving and cold in withdrawing her love? But now, in this bound proof she offered unlimited creative warmth. Paragon of humanist virtue! What a deception. Permitted only in fiction.
• The thinking man’s station was Radio Caroline, broadcast from a ship anchored not so far away, beyond where the Orwell, the Stour and the North Sea met. The ship lay just outside the three-mile limit, the DJs were renegades, rebels, and the authorities were in a panic
• The boredom of a fifteen-year-old can be as refined as Portuguese gold filigree, as the spiral orb web of the Karijini spider. Painstaking, skilful, static, like the embroidery that Jane Austen’s women persuaded themselves was work when nothing else was permitted... The three days passed like those hours of the first, a clever torture that left no mark.
• At last he understood that there was no liberating elsewhere beyond the sandbag defences of Gurji camp, that on the other side of the best orgasm he’d ever had, a better one was not waiting.
• Daphne explained her theory of domestic order. The centre of the modern home... was the kitchen, and the heart of the kitchen was its table. This was where children learned basic manners, including the unspoken rules of conversation, and how to be in company and where they would absorb for a lifetime the vital rhythm and rituals of regular meals and begin to take for granted their first simple duties in helping to clear away.
• The subject was mortality and therefore limitless. They looked ahead to their not-so-distant fiftieth birthdays and knew they were discussing their own future decline.
• Some love affairs comfortably and sweetly rot. Slowly, like fruit in a fridge.
• His old heart was worn out.” Roland suddenly could not trust his voice. His own altered version had detached a splinter of sorrow. It felt artificial, more to do with storytelling and that loaded word heart than the fact of a painful death.
• a terrible inappropriate thought. Liberation. He stood under a bigger sky. You are no longer your father’s son. You are the only father now.
• The man whose love for him was so fierce, so possessive, so frightening when he was small, was also the man who hit Rosalind, who swindled a widow and boasted about it, who dominated all domestic occasions, often drunkenly, who mercilessly repeated his thoughts, who had done some untold thing to earn Susan’s hatred. In everything his father was, Roland was implicated. So much he would prefer to set aside and forget. The untangling of these lines would never be complete.
• “God takes his debts in more than money.”
• He had in mind his father’s armchair by the window monotonously declaring his absence.
• He remembered his parents well enough at his age now. From then onwards nothing changed for them apart from physical decline and illness. <> How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He had never made an important decision. Except to leave school. No, that too was a reaction. He supposed he had put together a sort of education for himself, but that was messily done in a spirit of embarrassment or shame. Whereas Alissa—he saw the beauty of it. On a windy sunlit midweek morning she cleanly transformed her existence as she packed a small suitcase and, leaving her keys behind, walked out the front door, consumed by an ambition for which she was ready to suffer and make others suffer too.
• Flaubert himself had fallen in love at the age of fourteen with a twenty-six-year-old woman, also married.
• An enviable highly wrought state denied to children of the 1960s in their carnal impatience. He closed his eyes. Strictly formal social norms, extended denial and much unhappiness would be necessary to feel so much after a courteous handshake.
• The dogged fidelity of objects, to remain exactly as they had unthinkingly placed them.
• Now, forty years later, he had come to accuse this dignified lady, demand under threat a session of self-criticism. Like a young guardian of the Cultural Revolution, one of a self-righteous mob, tormenting an elderly Chinese professor. He had come to hang a sign round the neck of Miss Cornell. But no, this was all wrong. This was the victim’s customary self-blame and guilt. He was thinking like an adult. Remember, he was the child, she was the adult. His life had been altered. Some would say ruined. But was it really? She had given him joy. He was the stooge of current orthodoxies. No, that wasn’t it either! <>The tipping falling tumult of these contrary notions sickened him.
• Whether cruel behaviour enabled great or execrable poetry made no difference. A cruel act remained just that. This judgement ended the lecture. A murmur ran through the audience—of pleasure it seemed. To feel ambivalence in such a civilised context was agreeable... Such virtue in forgiveness could have been his way of protecting his pride, of arming himself against humiliation. What was true of Robert Lowell in the professor’s view had to be true of Alissa Eberhardt. The novels brilliant, the behaviour inexcusable.
• She struggled for her mother’s affection and grew up in the long shadow of her rancour... Her mother lived in a cage of unspoken resentments.
• As he saw it she was already dead and he was already grieving but could not do it in her presence. He was determined not to be the first to get up. A sense, not of significant leave-taking, but of politeness held them there.
• Whenever Roland met religious figures he felt obliged to protect them from his disbelief, which was so complete that even atheism bored him.
• here it was again, the simplest feature of death, always startling—absence.
• it was never a charge. That was not Daphne’s way. It was more of an observation, grey-washed with regret—for him rather than for herself.
• This was how to steer a life successfully, Roland thought. Make a choice, act! That’s the lesson. A shame not to have known the trick long ago. Good decisions came less through rational calculation, more from sudden good moods. But so too did some of his worst decisions.
• Later, on the walk back to the hotel, on that same subject, she murmured, “You were a restless fool.” <> Back on the mainland at the end of the stay they said their goodbyes on the quayside in a normal affectionate manner. For now they were purged of high emotion.
• It was not only science that Christianity had obstructed for fifty generations, it was nearly all of culture, nearly all of free expression and enquiry. It buried the open-minded philosophies of classical antiquity for an age, it sent thousands of brilliant minds down irrelevant rabbit holes of pettifogging theology. It had spread its so-called Word by horrific violence and it maintained itself by torture, persecution and death. Gentle Jesus, ha! Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision Song Contest in oils and gilt frames... Thank God for the Dutch!”
• Oh yes, he was a child and it was a crime, but it was something else besides and this was the problem. She couldn’t have said it, and he wouldn’t have listened. They lied by omission. She had loved him and made him love her. The hostage fell in love with his captor—the Stockholm Syndrome. On the rainy evening he made his escape with his trench-digging wages in his back pocket, he dragged the trunk containing all his possessions across her lawn, but he never got far. That was the damage, the forbidden matter—the attraction. The memory of the love remained inseparable from the crime. He could not go to the police.
• Roland thought, the world was wobbling badly on its axis, ruled in too many places by shameless ignorant men, while freedom of expression was in retreat and digital public spaces resounded with the shouts of delirious masses. Truth had no consensus...  Parts of the world were burning or drowning. Simultaneously, in the old-fashioned glow of close family, made more radiant by recent deprivation, he experienced happiness that could not be dispelled, even by rehearsing every looming disaster in the world. It made no sense.