narrowing choices (from 2004)
Posted by Gordon on November 10, 2008
Susan Johnson Hungry Ghosts Picador 1997
He was of the generation that had indulged in a long, extended youth and which would have trouble coming to terms with the finite nature of life and its unfortunate habit of ageing the body and narrowing choices.
For Anne-Louise life was still a stream in which she was swimming upwards, bound for some unimaginable open sea. She supposed herself destined for happiness as if happiness were a beautiful landing where you stopped and got out, eternally harboured. (p 20)
It struck me that until this moment our troubles had been small, surmountable, that we suffered only bad tempers and yearning. We had possessed the arrogance of the lucky, believing misfortune to be something which happened only to failures, to the unlucky, people who had somehow rendered themselves powerless. I saw now that there was no such division between the blessed and the unlucky, merely life passing over us all. (p 128)
Good: yearning. Next sentence not so good – lucky and unlucky aren’t logical – the belief we are lucky and (others?) unlucky is a tautology; she seems to hold it true while it is also the chimera she learns to un-know? I like this idea but think that it can be said better.
Same page:
… we were supposed to swim forever upwards, never intending to be swept down. … this new unexpected diversion … The grief of life cleaved to me and I knew it had come for good, settling within me deeply, beyond light.
[These notes from 2004; the year my ever-progressing narrative definitively stalled! I've just found similar ideas in Simone de Beauvoir's account of her twenties]
