Top highlights from Beautiful World, Where Are You
Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.
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When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn't changed very much since I was a child - a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that's all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth.
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And we hate people formaking mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that theeasiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.
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I was tired, it was late, I was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that wherever I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.
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What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goalthe engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same alwaysjust to live and be with other people?
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If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn't have made me who I am.
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And isnt death just the apocalypse in the first person?
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But if you think theres any chance that I could make you happy, I wish you would let me try. Because its the only thing I really want to do with my life.
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Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse - we can't remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing.
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At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape.
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I will probably continue to make poor life decisions and suffer recurrent depressive episodes
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I feel very embarrassed by all that now, but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didnt understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness.
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Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things I mean just the things that were in front of me. Peoples faces, the weather, traffic. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things. And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. There was something delicate about living like that like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.After a couple of months, I started to miss days. Sometimes I would fall asleep without remembering to write anything, but then other nights Id open the book and not know what to write I wouldnt be able to think of anything at all. When I did make entries, they were increasingly verbal and abstract: song titles, or quotes from novels, or text messages from friends. By spring I couldnt keep it up anymore. I started to put the diary away for weeks at a time it was just a cheap black notebook I got at work and then eventually Id take it back out to look at the entries from the previous year. At that point, I found it impossible to imagine ever feeling again as I had apparently once felt about rain or flowers. It wasnt just that I failed to be delighted by sensory experiences it was that I didnt actually seem to have them anymore. I would walk to work or go out for groceries or whatever and by the time I came home again I wouldnt be able to remember seeing or hearing anything distinctive at all. I suppose I was seeing but not looking the visual world just came to me flat, like a catalogue of information. I never looked at things anymore, in the way I had before.
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When I look back at those years, I feel touched and almost pained by the simplicity of the life I was living, because I knew what I had to do, and I did it, that was all.
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Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing.
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I suppose I think that having a child is simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing. And I want that- to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care. To prove it to whom, I wonder. Myself, maybe.
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Were they aware, in the intensity of their embrace, of something slightly ridiculous about this tableau, something almost comical, as someone nearby sneezed violently into a crumpled tissue; as a dirty discarded plastic bottle scuttled along the platform under a breath of wind; as a mechanised billboard on the station wall rotated from an advertisement for hair products to an advertisement for car insurance; as life in its ordinariness and even ugly vulgarity imposed itself everywhere all around them? Or were they in this moment unaware, or something more than unawarewere they somehow invulnerable to, untouched by, vulgarity and ugliness, glancing for a moment into something deeper, something concealed beneath the surface of life, not unreality but a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world?
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People who intentionally become famous - I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it - are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill. The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease.
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If you weren't my friend I wouldn't know who I was, she said.
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In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.
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People think that socialism is sustained by forcethe forcible expropriation of propertybut I wish they would just admit that capitalism is also sustained by exactly the same force in the opposite direction, the forcible protection of existing property arrangements.
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We cant conserve anything, and especially not social relations, without altering their nature, arresting some part of their interaction with time in an unnatural way.
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Tenderly, it seemed almost painfully, they smiled at one another, saying nothing, and their questions were the same, am I the one you think about, when we made love were you happy, have I hurt you, do you love me, will you always.
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I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven't arisen. But what if that's not true? What if I'm the one who can't let myself be happy? Because I'm scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pity, or I don't believe I deserve good things, or some other reason. Whenever something good happens to me I always find myself thinking: I wonder how long it will be until this turns out badly. And I almost want the worst to happen sooner, sooner rather than later, and if possibile straight away, so at least I don't have to feel anxious about it anymore.
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I think I would feel superficially sadder, but less fundamentally broken as a person, if I could just be sad about one break-up, rather than sad about my lifelong inability to sustain a meaningful relationship.
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When I was younger, I think what I wanted was to travel the world, to lead a glamorous life, to be celebrated for my work, to marry a great intellectual, to reject everything I had been raised with, to cut myself off from the narrow world. I feel very embarrassed by all that now, but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didnt understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness.
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But do you ever experience a sort of diluted, personalised version of that feeling, as if your own life, your own world, has slowly but perceptibly become an uglier place? Or even a sense that while you used to be in step with the cultural discourse, youre not anymore, and you feel yourself adrift from the world of ideas, alienated, with no intellectual home? Maybe it is about our specific historical moment, or maybe its just about getting older and disillusioned, and it happens to everyone. When I look back on what we were like when we first met, I dont think we were really wrong about anything, except about ourselves. The ideas were right, but the mistake was that we thought we mattered. Well, weve both had that particular error ground out of us in different ways me by achieving precisely nothing in over a decade of adult life, and you (if youll forgive me) by achieving as much as you possibly could and still not making one grain of difference to the smooth functioning of the capitalist system. When we were young, we thought our responsibilities stretched out to encompass the earth and everything that lived on it.
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That's the thing about work, if it was any good you'd do it for free.
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...but all that really means is that I love my life, and I'm really excited to have it back again, excited to feel that its going to continue, that new things will keep happening, that nothing is over yet.
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And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy. Its not just one thing or anotherit doesnt get fixed into a groove called personality and then run along that way until the end.
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Who is now alone, will long remain so, / will wake, read, write long letters / and wander restlessly here and there / along the avenues, as the leaves are drifting.
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So of course in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?
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When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasnt changed very much since I was a childa house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, thats all.
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Of course I know in my brain that everything we tell ourselves about human civilisation is a lie. But imagine having to find out in real life.
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I find it hard to believe anything really bad about myself when I consider how much he loves me.
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I feel so frightened of being hurt not of the suffering, which I know I can handle, but the indignity of suffering, the indignity of being open to it.
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At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape. So a mothers relationship with her daughter is poured into a vessel marked mother and child, and the relationship takes the contours of its container and is held inside there, for better or worse. Maybe some unhappy friends would have been perfectly contented as sisters, or married couples as parents and children, who knows. But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions.
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I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren't we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us.
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But we all have something wrong with us anyway, don't we? I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed.
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Most of our attempts throughout human history to describe the difference between right and wrong have been feeble and cruel and unjust, but that the difference still remains- beyond ourselves, beyond each specific culture, beyond every individual person who has ever lived or died, And we spend our lives trying to know that difference and to live by it, trying to love other people instead of hating them, and there is nothing else that matters on the earth.
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Whenever something good happens to me I always find myself thinking: I wonder how long it will be until this turns out badly. And I almost want the worst to happen sooner, sooner rather than later, and if possible straight away, so at least I dont have to feel anxious about it anymore.
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How graceful she looked in the crowd, his eyes followed her, her long beautiful neck, her shoulders gleaming in the sunlight. Like watching his life walk away from him.
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Anyway, as a consequence, each day has now become a new and unique informational unit, interrupting and replacing the informational world of the day before.
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We'll always be in each other's lives and we'll always have this feeling between us, and it's better.
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I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition.
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Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person's sense of self permanently.
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He made a noise that sounded like a strangled laugh, and then said: Ah, I like your style. Ill give you that. Youre not easy to get the upper hand on, are you? Obviously Im not going to manage it. Its funny, because you carry on like youd let me walk all over you, answering my texts at two in the morning, and then telling me youre in love with me, blah blah blah. But thats all your way of saying, just try and catch me, because you wont. And I can see I wont. Youre not going to let me have it for a minute. Nine times out of ten youd have someone fooled with the way you go on. Theyd be delighted with themselves, thinking they were really the boss of you. Yeah, yeah, but Im not an idiot. Youre only letting me act badly because it puts you above me, and thats where you like to be. Above, above. And I dont take it personally, by the way, I dont think youd let anyone near you. Actually, I respect it. Youre looking out for yourself, and Im sure you have your reasons. Im sorry I was so harsh on you with what I said, because you were right, I was just trying to hurt you. And I probably did hurt you, big deal. Anyone can hurt anyone if they go out of their way. But then instead of getting mad with me, you go saying Im welcome to stay over and you still love me and all this. Because you have to be perfect, dont you? No, you really have a way about you, I must say. And Im sorry, alright? I wont be trying to take a jab at you again. Lesson learned. But from now on you dont need to act like youre under my thumb, when we both know Im nowhere near you. Alright? Another long silence fell. Their faces were invisible in darkness. Eventually, in a high and strained voice, straining perhaps for an evenness or lightness it did not attain, she replied: Alright. If I ever do get a hold of you, you wont need to tell me, he said. Ill know. But Im not going to chase too much. Ill just stay where I am and see if you come to me. Yes, thats what hunters do with deer, she said. Before they kill them.
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Sometimes when I get really sad and depressed, you know, I lie in bed and think about you. I dont mean in a sexual way. I just think about the goodness of you as a person. And since you like me, or you love me, I must be okay. I can feel that feeling inside myself even now while Im describing it to you. Its like, when everything is really bad, its this one small feeling the size of an acorn, and its inside me, here. She gestured to the base of her breastbone, between her ribs. Its like the way, when Im upset, I know I can call you, and youll say soothing things to me, she said. And when I think about that, most of the time I dont even need to call you, because I can feel it, the way Im describing. I can feel that youre with me. I know that probably sounds stupid. But if we got together and then broke up, would I not be able to feel that anymore? And what would I have inside here instead? She tapped the base of her breastbone again with anxious fingers. Nothing? she asked.
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I agree that it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day. We can wait, if you like, to ascend to some higher plane of being, at which point well start directing all our mental and material resources toward existential questions and thinking nothing of our own families, friends and lovers and so on. But well be waiting, in my opinion, a long time. And, in fact, well die first. After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, dont they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isnt death just the apocalypse in the first person? So, in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you so derisively call breaking up and staying together, because at the end of our lives, when there is nothing left in front of us, its still the only thing we want to talk about. Maybe were just born to love and worry about the people we know and to go on loving and worrying, even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isnt it -- in a way -- a nice reason to die out? The nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganizing the distribution of the worlds resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much, and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity. And in fact its the very reason I root for us to survive -- because we are so stupid about each other.
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a perfect example of our shallow self-congratulatory book culture, in which non-readers are shunned as morally inferior, and the more books you read, the better you are than everyone else.
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I think the beauty industry is responsible for some of the worst ugliness we see around us in our visual environment, and the worst, most false aesthetic ideal, which is the ideal of consumerism.
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Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.
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I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Arent we unfortunate babies to be born as the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us. Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some point in the future another will take its place. In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.
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And now I just feel like the kind of person whose life partner would fall out of love with them after several years, and I cant find a way not to be that kind of person anymore.
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I was in the local shop today, getting something to eat for lunch, when I suddenly had the strangest sensationa spontaneous awareness of the unlikeliness of this life. I mean, I thought of all the rest of the human populationmost of whom live in what you and I would consider abject povertywho have never seen or entered such a shop. And this, this, is what all their work sustains! This lifestyle, for people like us! All the various brands of soft drinks in plastic bottles and all the pre-packaged lunch deals and confectionery in sealed bags and store-baked pastriesthis is it, the culmination of all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations. All for this! This convenience shop! I felt dizzy thinking about it. I mean I really felt ill. It was as if I suddenly remembered that my life was all part of a television showand every day people died making the show, were ground to death in the most horrific ways, children, women, and all so that I could choose from various lunch options, each packaged in multiple layers of single-use plastic. That was what they died forthat was the great experiment. I thought I would throw up. Of course, a feeling like that cant last. Maybe for the rest of the day I feel bad, even for the rest of the weekso what? I still have to buy lunch. And in case youre worrying about me, let me assure you, buy lunch I did.
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I know you're scared. And maybe you really meant all those things you said about our friendship, just wanting to be friends, and if you did, I'll accept that. But I feel maybe it's possible you said those things, at least in some way, because you wanted me to make the other case. As if I would come out and say, please, Eileen, don't do this to me, I've been in love with you all along, I don't know how to live without you. Or whatever, whatever you wanted me to say. Not that it's not true, of course it's true. And maybe even when you're getting angry at Alice, saying that she doesn't care about you I don't know, maybe it's the same idea. At some level you want her to say, oh but Eileen, I love you very much, you're my best friend. But the problem is that you seem to be drawn to people who aren't very good at giving you those responses. I mean, anyone could have told you certainly Felix and myself both knew that Alice was never going to react that way just now. And maybe it's the same with me, in a way. If you tell me you don't want to be with me, I might feel very hurt and humiliated, but I'm not going to start begging and pleading with you. At some level, I actually think you know I won't. But then you get left with the impression that I don't love you, or I don't want you, because you're not getting this response from me this response that you basically know you won't get, because I'm not the type of person who can give it to you.
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Whatever I can do, whatever insignificant talent I might have, people just expect me to sell it- I mean literally, sell it for money, until I have a lot of money and no talent left.
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For a time they sat there on the stairs, not speaking, or speaking absently about things that had happened a long time ago, silly arguments theyd had, people they used to know, things they had laughed about together. Old conversations, repeated many times before. Then quiet again for a little while. I just want everything to be like it was, Eileen said. And for us to be young again and live near each other, and nothing to be different. Alice was smiling sadly. But if things are different, can we still be friends? she asked. Eileen put her arm around Alices shoulders. If you werent my friend I wouldnt know who I was, she said. Alice rested her face in Eileens arm, closing her eyes. No, she agreed. I wouldnt know who I was either. And actually for a while I didnt. Eileen looked down at Alices small blonde head, nestled on the sleeve of her dressing gown. Neither did I, she said. Half past two in the morning. Outside, astronomical twilight. Crescent moon hanging low over the dark water. Tide returning now with a faint repeating rush over the sand. Another place, another time.
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Im sorry to say that I think it is too late to change the way we have turned out. The turning-out process has come to an end, and we are to a very great extent what we are.
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Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse we cant remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing. Maybe thats why middle-aged people always think their thoughts and feelings are more important than those of young people, because they can only weakly remember the feelings of their youth while allowing their present experiences to dominate their life outlook.
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