Nate Estelle

“How to live up to all this: which seems at times the only question. Feels he has at once too much power and too little, enough to make a mess of everything, not enough to sort it out. Is he humiliating them both, she, the other, inflicting on them some terrible exotic pain, for his own selfish satisfaction. Is it shame he feels, that hot blood pounding in his ears, or only embarrassment: the minor trifling embarrassment of an awkward situation or the true shame of a moral wrong. How is it possible to know. What can life be made to accommodate, what can one life hold inside itself without breaking. For him they will make the grand attempt in any case, he thinks, yes, and maybe for reasons of their own, curiosity, pleasure, pride, desire, and also the principle, the possibility, the ideal of another way of life. An experiment bound almost certainly for one kind of failure or another, and yet attaining for these few hours and days to a miraculous success, a perfection of beauty, inexchangeable, meant not to be interpreted, meant only to be lived and nothing more.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo