(It’s worth following this Twitter hashtag that is featuring some fun language posts.)
Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.
(From Murakami’s 1Q84 - page 441 - which I am steadily making my way through. This is not a new insight at all, but it is a truth simply expressed.)
Opinion was divided as to whether she had left me, and I didn’t know for sure myself, as we don’t discuss such things. The evidence seemed to be that she had, given that she no longer lived here, but we continued to visit. People said jokingly that I had the ideal marriage, but in reality such division of life plans was difficult to think about positively, and the travelling was complicated.
(Not that the case needs to be made by me, Hugo Williams is a successful author, poet and columnist, but this excerpt from his Freelance column in the Times Literary Supplement of 9 December 2011 about his wife Hermine is simply more evidence of the mischievous and sublime clarity of his writing).
Tides
The evening advances, then withdraws again
Leaving our cups and books like islands on the floor.
We are drifting, you and I,
As far from another as the young heroes
Of these two novels we have just laid down.
For that is happiness: to wander alone
Surrounded by the same moon, whose tides remind us of ourselves,
Our distances, and what we leave behind.
The lamp left on, the curtains letting in the light.
These things were promises. No doubt we will come back to them.
(The poem is by Hugo Williams, who I read in the Times Literary Supplement where he is an occasional contributor to the TLS’s Freelance column. On the strength of his beautifully crafted columns, and this poem, I have just ordered his Collected Poems published about eight or nine years ago.)
“Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”
(From the New York Times obituary on the death last night of Christoper Hitchens, talking about the what used to be called ‘dissolute’ life that likely led to his cancer. Thank goodness he was unrepentant about the life he lived … and his atheism.)
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