Status Updates From Gravel Heart

Some people have a use in the world, even if it is only to swell a crowd and say yeah, and some people don't.

'Sometimes I wonder if things were meant to happen as they did,' I said, 'or if there was a mistake, a mess-up along the way.'

'The whole world ends up in London somehow,' I said. 'The British never left anyone in peace and squeezed everything good out of everybody and took it home, and now a bedraggled lot of niggers and turks have come to share in it.'

All the children of the powerful were being groomed to be powerful too. That is what families do, if for no other reason than to ensure the security of their plunder. That's how things are.

Dying is such a degrading business.

There was no choice but to sit silently while history was narrated anew, no choice but to wait in a dumbly unenthusiastic silence for the mocking dismantling of our old stories, until later when we could whisperingly remind each other what the plunderers had tried to steal from us.

I’ve even gone as far north as the Baltic ports and back, which I would not recommend to you.

'After a while,' my mother told me 'it becomes as if these things did not really happen like that, as if you're exaggerating if you speak of them. So you stop speaking and they recede even further away, become even more unreal, become even less possible to imagine, and you tell yourself it is time to move on, let them go, it is not worth the bother of remembering. But they do not let you go.