you'll have to click on Watch on YouTube which takes you as far as page 24
Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.
You may point out – correctly – that it isn’t a real question. Because we don’t have the choice. If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don’t, so there isn’t. Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love.
Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.
But here’s the first problem. If this is your only story, then it’s the one you have most often told and retold, even if – as is the case here – mainly to yourself. The question then is: do all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away? I’m not sure. One test might be whether, as the years pass, you come out better from your own story, or worse. To come out worse might indicate that you are being more truthful. On the other hand, there is the danger of being retrospectively anti-heroic: making yourself out to have behaved worse than you actually did can be a form of self-praise. So I shall have to be careful. Well, I have learned to become careful over the years. As careful now as I was careless then. Or do I mean carefree? Can a word have two opposites?"
A young man seducing (and seduced by) an older woman who will offer him a way out of childhood but later cause him no end of questions and regrets, is the sort of plot that could be pulled from countless French novels, but it is the prose rather than the plot that keeps you reading.
"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us", wrote Kafka. This book fits this description. After "The Sense of an Ending", it's an another typical Julian Barnes novel of recollections. Good reading for yet another overcast day like today. We've just come back from our morning walk and I'm settling in for another day of reading. Time to pass me the retsina.
