These are a few of my favourite things...

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another has begun. There is something here that speaks of our essentials helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives in bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence parts seize on the tongue, so that to say “Twelve years passed” is to deny the fact of biographical logic. How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us?

Passion is passion. It’s the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn’t matter where it’d directed.. It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith… the saddest people I’ve ever met in life are the ones who don’t care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there’s nothing to make it last.

‘But it’s completely, absolutely, entirely empty,’ she complains, as if there are recognizable degrees of emptiness. ‘No pictures, no clothes, no photos. I mean, you’ve wiped out every reference to our past. Our family might not have happened. There was no point in it existing for the last two hundred years if it’s got nothing to show for itself.’
It is an interesting view but not one I share. Is it really necessary to record your life in order to make it worthwhile or commendable? Is it worthless to die without reference? Surely those testimonials last another generation or two at most, and even then they don’t offer much meaning. We all know we’re a mere fleck in the tremendous universal cycle of energy, but no one can abide the thought of their life, lived so intensively and exhaustively, being lost when they die, as swiftly and as meaningless as an unspoken idea.

Politeness. Now there’s a poor man’s virtue if ever there was one. What’s so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know? After all, it’s easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else. People with ambition don’t give a damn about what other people think of them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he’d hurt someone’s feelings. But then he was a genius.