"The Sense of an Ending"

[fiefoe]

Huh, I finally met an unreliable narrator I can like in Julian Barne's trim and well-woven novella.

• This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.
• Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
• But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.
• a teacher whose system of control depended on maintaining sufficient but not excessive boredom.
• Colin, Alex and I squinted at one another, hoping that the question wouldn’t be flicked, like an angler’s fly, to land on one of our heads.
• Marshall was a cautious know-nothing who lacked the inventiveness of true ignorance.
• the three of us, as a symbol of our bond, used to wear our watches with the face on the inside of the wrist. It was an affectation, of course, but perhaps something more. It made time feel like a personal, even a secret, thing.
• He gave the impression that he believed in things. We did too—it was just that we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us. Hence what we thought of as our cleansing scepticism.
• then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior. None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.
• Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion that principles should guide actions.
• If Alex had read Russell and Wittgenstein, Adrian had read Camus and Nietzsche. I had read George Orwell and Aldous Huxley; Colin had read Baudelaire and Dostoevsky. This is only a slight caricature.
• assured one another that the imagination’s first duty was to be transgressive.
• The more anarchic, like Colin, argued that everything was down to chance, that the world existed in a state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, itself doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed meaning on what might or might not have happened. Hunt gave a brief nod to Colin’s attempt to undermine everything, as if morbid disbelief was a natural by-product of adolescence.
• "It seems to me that there is—was—a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else. But of course, my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened. That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”
• This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents—were they the stuff of Literature?
• Real literature was about psychological, emotional and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time. That’s what Phil Dixon had told us anyway.
• “ ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ ” “Is it, indeed? Where did you find that?” “Lagrange, sir. Patrick Lagrange.
• That single word “pregnant” seemed to hover like chalk dust. / a quick yet withholding smile.
• “I don’t dance,” she said, part anthropologist, part layer-down of rules for any relationship we might have, were we to go out together.
• And overall, I had enough of the right titles: Richard Hoggart, Steven Runciman, Huizinga, Eysenck, Empson … plus Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God
• in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status.
• Adrian paused. He took a sip of beer, and then said with sudden vehemence, “I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious. I really hate it.”
• One that does—one single, distinct event—was the night I witnessed the Severn Bore.
• Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.
• I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others.
• In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning: that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.
• Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide’s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner?
• Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.