It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again. That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature. (查看原文)
Elisabeth goes back to the book and by chance the page she's on happens to be quoting Shakespeare. 'O brave new world!' Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble. "O brave new world!' It was a challenge, a command. To look up from it and see the commemorative money at the very second when the book brings Shakespeare and itself properly together--that's really something. (查看原文)
If this were a drama on TV, Elisabeth says, you know what would happen now?
It's largely rubbish, TV, the man says. I prefer box sets.
What I'm saying is, Elisabeth says, in the next shot you'd be dead of oyster poisoning and I'd be being arrested and blamed for something I didn't do.
Power of suggestion, the man says.
Suggestion of power, Elisabeth says.
Oh, very clever, the man says.
And also, this notion that my head's the wrong size in a photograph would mean I've probably done or am going to do something really wrong and illegal, Elisabeth says. And because I asked you about facial recognition technology, because I happen to know it exists and I asked you if the passport people use it, that makes me a suspect as well. And there's the notion, too, in your particular take on our s... (查看原文)
What does your name mean? she said.
It means I'm lucky and happy, he said. The Gluck part. And that if I'm ever thrown into a pit that's full of hungry lions I'll survive. That's the first name. And if you ever have a dream and you don't know what it means you can ask me. My first name also designates an ability to interpret dreams.
Can you? Elisabeth said.
She sat down on her own piece of kerb only slightly along from the neighbour.
Actually I'm extremely bad at it, he said. But I can make up something useful, entertaining, perspicacious and kind. We have this in common, you and I. As well as the capacity to become someone else, if we to choose.
You mean you have it in common with my sister, Elisabeth said.
I od, the neighbour said. Very pleased to meet you both. Finally.
How do... (查看原文)
That morning on the radio she'd heard a spokesperson say, but it's not just that we've been rhetorically and practically encouraging the opposite of integration for immigrants to this country. It's that we've been rhetorically and practically encouraging ourselves not to integrate. We've been doing this as a matter of self-policing since Thatcher taught us to be selfish and not just to think but to believe that there's no such thing as society. (查看原文)
It is possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren't yours let you see where you are, who you are. (查看原文)
Well, that's one reading of it, Elisabeth says. My own preferred reading is: free spirit arrives on earth equipped with the skill and the vision capable of blasting the tragic stuff that happens to us all into space, where it dissolves away to nothing whenever you pay any attention to the lifeforce in her pictures. (查看原文)
Zoe tells Elisabeth that her mother'd been held for an hour, got off with a caution and it right now at the antiques yard down the road at the junction, stockpiling more stuff to throw at the fence, that her mother's new plan is that every day she's going to fo and get herself arrested (and here she imitates Elisabeth's mother perfectly) bombarding that fence with people's histories and with the artefacts of less cruel and more philanthropic times. (查看原文)
November again. It's more winter than autumn. That's more mist. It's fog.
...
The trees are revealing their structures. There's the catch of fire in the air. All the souls are out marauding. But there are roses, there are still roses. In the damp and the cold, and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there's a wide-open rose, still.
Look at the colour of it. (查看原文)
She is mad.
But she is uncannily right about that story.
She is brilliant.
She is a whole new level of the word true.
She is dangerous and shining.
(查看原文)
A lady with a little dog has stopped and is standing there looking up, hand shielding her eyes; apart from that the street continues as ever, with no idea that his little sister is that mad, that brave, that clever, that wild and that calm, and that she's going to be a great force in the world, an important thinker, a changer of things, someone to be reckoned with. (查看原文)
It's a question of how we regard our situations, dearest Dani, how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how best to act. Hope is exactly that, that's all it is, a master of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we're here for a mere blink fo the eyes, that's all. But in that Augenblick there's either a benign wink or a willing blindness, and we have to know we're equally capable of both, and to be ready to be above and beyond the foul even when we're up to our eyes in it. So it's important--and here I acknowledge ... (查看原文)
That's what I'm saying, Elisabeth said. I couldn't sleep.
Because of the book? Daniel said.
Elisabeth told him about the pavement, her feet, her father's face. Daniel looked grave. He sat down on the lawn. He parted the place on the grass next to him.
It's all right to forget, you know, he said. It's good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we'd never sleep ever again. (查看原文)
What I do when it distresses me that there's something I can't remember, is. Are you listening?
Yes, Elisabeth said through the crying.
I imagine that whatever it is I've forgotten is folded close to me, like a sleeping bird.
What kind of bird? Elisabeth said.
A wild bird, Daniel said. Any kind. You'll know what kind when it happens. Then, what I do is, I just hold it there, without holding it too tight, and I let it sleep. And that's that.
(查看原文)
October's a blink of the eye. The apples weighing down the tree a minute ago are gone and the tree's leaves are yellow and thinning. A frost has snapped millions of trees all across the country into brightness. The ones that aren't evergreen are a combination of beautiful and tawdry, red orange gold the leaves, then brown, and down.
The days are unexpectedly mild. It doesn't feel that far from summer, not really, if it weren't for the underbite of the day, the lacy creep of the dark and the damp at its edges, the plants calm in the folding themselves away, the beads of the condensation on the webstrings hung between things.
On the warm days it feels wrong, so many leaves falling.
But the nights are cool to cold.
The spiders in the sheds and the houses are guarding their egg sacs in... (查看原文)
