Beautiful World, Where Are You(4)

Alice was still standing by the door. Yes, it’s beautiful, she said. Even better in the evening, actually.

He turned away from the window, casting his appraising glance around the room’s other features, while Alice watched.

Very nice, he concluded. Very nice room. Are you going to write a book while you’re here?

I suppose I’ll try.

And what are your books about?

Oh, I don’t know, she said. People.

That’s a bit vague. What kind of people do you write about, people like you?

She looked at him calmly, as if to tell him something: that she understood his game, perhaps, and that she would even let him win it, as long as he played nicely.

What kind of person do you think I am? she said.

Something in the calm coolness of her look seemed to unsettle him, and he gave a quick, yelping laugh. Well, well, he said. I only met you a few hours ago, I haven’t made up my mind on you yet.

You’ll let me know when you do, I hope.

I might.

For a few seconds she stood there in the room, very still, while he wandered around a little and pretended to look at things. They knew then, both of them, what was about to happen, though neither could have said exactly how they knew. She waited impartially while he continued glancing around, until finally, perhaps with no more energy to delay the inevitable, he thanked her and left. She walked him down the stairs – part of the way down. She was standing on the steps when he went out the door. It was one of those things. Both of them afterwards felt bad, neither of them certain really why the evening had been such a failure in the end. Pausing there on the stairs, alone, she looked back up at the landing. Follow her eyes now and notice the bedroom door left open, a slice of white wall visible through the banister posts.





2


Dear Eileen. I’ve waited so long for you to reply to my last email that I am actually –

imagine! – writing you a new one before receiving your reply. In my defence I’ve gathered up too much material now, and if I wait for you I’ll start forgetting things. You should know that our correspondence is my way of holding on to life, taking notes on it, and thereby preserving something of my – otherwise almost worthless, or even entirely worthless – existence on this rapidly degenerating planet . . . I include this paragraph chiefly to make you feel guilty about not replying to me before now, and therefore secure myself a swifter response this time. What are you doing, anyway, if not emailing me? Don’t say working.

I am going crazy thinking about the rent you’re paying in Dublin. You know it’s more expensive there now than Paris? And, forgive me, but what Paris has Dublin lacks. One of the problems is that Dublin is, and I mean literally and topographically, flat – so that everything has to take place on a single plane. Other cities have metro systems, which add depth, and steep hills or skyscrapers for height, but Dublin has only short squat grey buildings and trams that run along the street. And it has no courtyards or roof gardens like continental cities, which at least break up the surface – if not vertically, then conceptually. Have you thought about it this way before? Maybe even if you haven’t, you’ve noticed it at some subconscious level. It’s hard to go very far up in Dublin or very low down, hard to lose yourself or other people, or to gain a sense of perspective.

You might think it’s a democratic way to organise a city – so that everything happens face to face, I mean, on equal footing. True, no one is looking down on you all from a height. But it gives the sky a position of total dominance. Nowhere is the sky meaningfully punctuated or broken up by anything at all. The Spire, you might point

out, and I will concede the Spire, which is anyway the narrowest possible of interruptions, and dangles like a measuring tape to demonstrate the diminutive size of every other edifice around. The totalising effect of the sky is bad for people there.

Nothing ever intervenes to block the thing from view. It’s like a memento mori. I wish someone would cut a hole in it for you.

I’ve been thinking lately about right-wing politics (haven’t we all), and how it is that conservatism (the social force) came to be associated with rapacious market capitalism.

The connection is not obvious, at least to me, since markets preserve nothing, but ingest all aspects of an existing social landscape and excrete them, shorn of meaning and memory, as transactions. What could be ‘conservative’ about such a process? But it also strikes me that the idea of ‘conservatism’ is in itself false, because nothing can be conserved, as such – time moves in one direction only, I mean. This idea is so basic that when I first thought of it, I felt very brilliant, and then I wondered if I was an idiot. But does it make some sense to you? We can’t conserve anything, and especially not social relations, without altering their nature, arresting some part of their interaction with time in an unnatural way. Just look at what conservatives make of the environment: their idea of conservation is to extract, pillage and destroy, ‘because that’s what we’ve always done’ – but because of that very fact, it’s no longer the same earth we do it to. I suppose you think this is all extremely rudimentary and maybe even that I’m un-dialectical. But these are just the abstract thoughts I had, which I needed to write down, and of which you find yourself the (willing or unwilling) recipient.

I was in the local shop today, getting something to eat for lunch, when I suddenly had the strangest sensation – a spontaneous awareness of the unlikeliness of this life. I