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The events of 1870-71 impressed on everyone who experienced them a profound sense of precariousness. Many who lived through the Terrible Year succumbed to a new and suddenly deeper sense of existential fragility, and it is hard not to see Impressionism’s emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and transient domesticity as expressions of this heightened awareness of change and mortality.

Art is one of the ways we reveal the peculiarities of consciousness – for me it’s the clearest way. It’s through other people’s novels,other people’s paintings, other people’s poems & other people’s music that I am made aware that everybody is not like anyone else, and yet we are all stuck inside these flesh cages, experiencing what we imagine to be a shared reality through a radically singular medium: consciousness.

Whenever I consider the very many writers who have left their mark on my writing in one way or another, I am reminded that you do not need to be perfectly aligned with someone to be in their debt. See also: parents.
(introduction to obituaries written for Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Hillary Mantel)

It strikes me that the glory of art is the glory of survival, for survival is an inhuman property. It is an attribute of mountains and objects, of the worthless toys in the children's bedroom at home that will outlive us all. That which is human decays and disappears: only in art does the quality of humanity favour survival. Only in art is a record kept of an instant, that the next instant doesn't erase.

I am thinking about the future, though these thoughts are wordless and indistinct.. They are like running water, they pour towards an edge, a precipice,and tumble over the side. I don't want to go home Life could become flat again. It is desire that is big and grand and treacherous; desire, not life.

We turn to art to dignify our eexperience of the world;to find a reply to the question of consciousness.But I, too, have a qualm about the Fra Angelicos, the Peruginos.It is that they belong to the past.Their reality is so remote from our own:I fear to look at them is a form of nostalgia.I fear the feeling of sadness they cause me, sadness that our own world is not more beautiful.
(paradoxical thought, if you ask me)

In England,I became increasingly sure that to possess sth was to arrest knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession.But there is an element of death in knowledge.Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost.Its presence is painful,because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.

The spaghetti alle vongole is so delicious that it has a kind of holiness about it. Trained as we now are on sheep's milk cheese and white Italian flour, purged of our promiscuous tastes, we are capable of understanding it. It is our prize, our reward, this understanding. A pile of empty clam-shells remains on my plate like the integuments of a poem whose meaning I have finally teased out.

We eat sheep's milk cheese and tomatoes. We eat the rough white bread. It is strange to eat the same things over and over again.It is not that we dislike this new, narrow range of satisfactions: on the contrary, the idea of eating at a wider scope begins to seem more and more grotesque. It is important to be satisfied by what is known to you. Is that not a basic truth, biblical like the olive tree?

In the old town an atmosphere of unusual refinement prevails. Every infelicitous speck of modernity has been sieved out. Of course, the beautiful islands of the past in their turbid oceans of modernity are to be found all over Europe, in England too. At the heart of every hideous human settlement we find an image of our predeceased ancestor, aestheticism. It is our lot to defend that image, lifeless as it might seem.

After the exhilaration of escape, we find that we are all still here, unaltered. But we did not come here to find ourselves: we came for something we are able to identify only by its absence.

We have closed the door on England as one would close the door on a dark and cluttered house and walk out into the sun. It is this release, from the feeling of interiority, that I relish the most. Yet I love its darkness and clutter, its shady labyrinths of memory and emotion. They give rise to feelings of outward misshapenness, but they have their own value, the heavy metal coins of Englishness.

At home I often felt that our life lacked beauty:I looked for it in music,in poetry and painting,in the world itself,when a particular evening sky or fall of light,a glimpse of city trees in leaf,seemed to become more than itself. I would put peonies in a vase,tidy up,but I never found much art in daily things.There was always too much reality churning just ahead,mixing everything together into a grey agitated mass.

Always the effort of resistance, of counter-motion, of breaking off into what is untried and unknown: yet the unknown seems in its distance and blank mystery to contain for me a form of hope, a strange force that is pure possibility.

Literature encourages resistance to capitalist values, to the practicalities of getting and spending. Literature is the noise of culture as well as its information. It is an entropic force as well cultural capital. It is a writing that calls for a reading and engages readers in problems of meaning.

'Literature' is an instutional label that gives us reason to expect that the results of our reading efforts will be 'worth it'. And many of the features of literature follow from the willingness of readers to pay attention, to explore uncertainties, and not immediately ask 'what do you mean by that?'

Theory is driven by the impossible desire to step outside your own thought, both to place it and to understand it, and also by a desire for change - this is a possible desire- both in the world your thought engages and in the ways of your own thought, which always could be sharper, more knowledgeable and capacious, more self-reflecting.

Theory is a source for constant upstagings: 'What! You haven't read Lacan! How can you talk about the lyric without addressing the specular constitution of the speaking subject? Or 'How can you write about the Victorian novel without using Foucault's account of the deployment of sexuality and the hysterization of women's bodies?'

Yesterday I went for a walk by the sea with a friend and the air was thick with mist and the sea was buffeting and jolting towards the shore in long angry waves. But then the sun came through and we were surrounded by a buttery light, the kind of light that William Blake used for Heaven and its inhabitants.

Le prodige fut que cette grosse fille jouait à la ville des rôles de charmeuse, sans un effort. C'étaient des souplesses de couleuvre, un déshabillé savant, comme involontaire, exquis d'élégance, une distinction nerveuse de chatte de race, une aristocratie du vice, superbe, révoltée, mettant le pied sur Paris, en maîtresse toute-puissante. Elle donnait le ton, de grandes dames l'imitaient.

Nana avait toujours tremblé devant la loi, cette puissance inconnue, cette vengeance des hommes qui pouvaient la supprimer, sans que personne au monde la défendit.

Elle guettait les mieux mis, elle voyait ça à leurs yeux pâles. C'était comme un coup de folie charnelle passant sur la ville. Elle avait un peu peur, car les plus comme il faut étaient les plus sales. Tout le vernis craquait, la bête se montrait, exigeante dans ses goûts monstrueux, raffinant sa perversion.

Tout son être se révoltait, la lente possession dont Nana l'envahissait l'effrayait, en lui rappelant ses lectures de piété, les possessions diaboliques qui avaient bercé son enfance. Il croyait au diable. Nana, confusément était le diable, avec ses rires, avec sa gorge et sa croupe, gonflés de vice.

But how can we hold such a tiny thing against her? Don't we all of us slay each other, day in, day out, hour after hour, with our exquisite smiles and shattering indifference, our lavish displays of wealth that the more impoverished members of society can only lower their eyes before?

How could he fail to be alert to the slightest of her intonations and remarks! When you see someone you love continually weighing in secret, like gleaming copper weights on the pan of a golden scale, on one side her life, on the other her death, and you see her stooping to examine precisely on which side it tips - how can you help but peer over her shoulder?

Hiking around with someone who doesn't look at things as you do is always interesting. Fanny moves through the landscape not in order to read there like the Narrator, but to live. The open sky and the rolling meadows lend themselves to the movement of her thoughts, whereas for the Narrator everything falls still so that he can savor - just savor -down to the tiniest detail - as a happy expanse of untamed countryside.

Perhaps we all have lives the person closest to us knows nothing of? And perhaps this is what really attracts us to each other: the presence of this secret life which, from time to time, is revealed to us through a gleaming, narrow slit. The vision is fleeting and comes as a complete surprise; all our convictions are shaken because, however observant we might be, we hadn’t noticed a thing

I said I wasn't sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting: when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world - whatever its features - was catastrophic.

And there is no better hiding place, he said, than somewhere as close as possible to the truth, something all good liars know.

And there is no better hiding place, he said, than somewhere as close as possible to the truth, something all good liars know.