Quinn’s Reviews > The Sense of an Ending > Status Update

‘But time… How time first grounds us and then confound us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagine we were being responsible, but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time… Give us enough time in our best supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainty whimsical.’

‘.. everybody can simply blame everyone else. But my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more of a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened. That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it? The question of subjective vs objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian to understand the version that is being put in front of us.’

‘ Indeed isn’t the whole business of a scribing responsibility a kind of cop out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is -was-a train of individual responsibilities all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that …’

‘… then put together a way of life on threateningly fuller, than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior. None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit’