But no, I’m telling the truth. Can we see each other sometime soon? Eileen said yes. I’ll act normal, he added. Don’t worry. After they hung up, she plugged a charging cable into her phone and switched off the bedside light. The artificial orange glow of urban light pollution permeated the thin curtains of her bedroom window. With her eyes still open, she touched herself for a minute and a half, came noiselessly, and then turned over on her side to go to sleep.
8
Dear Alice. When you say you’re going to Rome, do you mean for work? I don’t want to be intrusive, but I thought you were supposed to be taking a break for a while? I wish you well on your trip, of course, I just wonder whether it’s a good idea to start doing public events again so soon. If you find it cathartic to write me histrionic messages about the publishing world where you say everyone you know is bloodthirsty and wants to kill you or fuck you to death, by all means continue to write them. No doubt you have met evil people through your work, though I suspect you’ve met a lot of boring, ethically average people as well. I’m not denying you’re in pain, by the way – I know you are, and that’s why I’m surprised you’re subjecting yourself to all this again. Are you flying from Dublin? We could try to see each other before your flight if so . . .
I didn’t think I was in a bad mood sitting down to write this reply but maybe I am. I’m not trying to make you feel that your horrible life is in fact a privilege, although by any reasonable definition it very literally is. Okay, I make about 20k a year and pay two-thirds of that in rent for the opportunity to live in a tiny apartment with people who dislike me, and you make about two hundred thousand euro a year (?) and live alone in a gigantic country house, but for all that I don’t think I would enjoy your life any more than you do. Anyone capable of enjoying it must have something wrong with them, as you point out. But we all have something wrong with us anyway, don’t we? I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed. The worst thing is that I actually think people on there are generally well meaning and the impulses are right, but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to be essentially gibberish. Everyone is at once hysterically attached to particular identity
categories and completely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve. The only apparent schema is that for every victim group (people born into poor families, women, people of colour) there is an oppressor group (people born into rich families, men, white people). But in this framework, relations between victim and oppressor are not historical so much as theological, in that the victims are transcendently good and the oppressors are personally evil. For this reason, an individual’s membership of a particular identity group is a question of unsurpassed ethical significance, and a great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individuals into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their proper moral reckoning.
If serious political action is still possible, which I think at this point is an open question, maybe it won’t involve people like us – in fact I think it almost certainly won’t. And frankly if we have to go to our deaths for the greater good of humankind, I will accept that like a lamb, because I haven’t deserved this life or even enjoyed it. But I would like to be helpful in some way to the project, whatever it is, and if I could help only in a very small way, I wouldn’t mind, because I would be acting in my own self-interest anyway
– because it’s also ourselves we’re brutalising, though in another way, of course. No one wants to live like this. Or at least, I don’t want to live like this. I want to live differently, or if necessary to die so that other people can one day live differently. But looking at the internet, I don’t see many ideas worth dying for. The only idea on there seems to be that we should watch the immense human misery unfolding before us and just wait for the most immiserated, most oppressed people to turn around and tell us how to stop it. It seems that there exists a curiously unexplained belief that the conditions of exploitation will by themselves generate a solution to exploitation – and
that to suggest otherwise is condescending and superior, like mansplaining. But what if the conditions don’t generate the solution? What if we’re waiting for nothing, and all these people are suffering without the tools to end their own suffering? And we who have the tools refuse to do anything about it, because people who take action are criticised. Oh, that’s all very well, but then, what action do I ever take? In my defence I’m very tired and I don’t have any good ideas. Really my problem is that I’m annoyed at everyone else for not having all the answers, when I also have none. And who am I to ask for humility and openness from other people? What have I ever given the world to ask so much in return? I could disintegrate into a heap of dust, for all the world cares, and that’s as it should be.
Anyway, I have a new theory. Would you like to hear it? Ignore this paragraph if not.
My theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence. You can actually see the change in process if you look at street photography from before and after 1976. I know we have good reason to be sceptical of aesthetic nostalgia, but the fact remains that before the 1970s, people wore durable clothes of wool and cotton, stored drinks in glass bottles, wrapped food produce in paper, and filled their houses with sturdy wooden furniture.
Now a majority of objects in our visual environment are made of plastic, the ugliest substance on earth, a material which when dyed does not take on colour but actually exudes colour, in an inimitably ugly way. One thing a government could do with my approval (and there aren’t many) would be to prohibit the production of each and every form of plastic not urgently necessary for the maintenance of human life. What do you think?
I don’t know why you’re being so coy about this person Felix. Who is he? Are you sleeping with him? Not that you have to tell me if you don’t want to. Simon never tells me anything anymore. Apparently he’s been going out with a twenty-three-year-old for about two months and I’ve never even seen her. Needless to say, the idea that Simon –
who was already a grown man in his twenties when I was fifteen – is having regular sex with a woman six years my junior makes me want to crawl directly into my grave. And it’s never some ugly little nerd with mousy hair and interesting opinions about Pierre Bourdieu, it’s always an Instagram model who has like 17,000 followers and gets sent free samples from skincare brands. Alice, I hate pretending that the personal vanity of attractive young women is anything other than boring and embarrassing. Mine worst of all. Not to be dramatic, but if Simon gets this girl pregnant I will throw myself out of a window. Imagine having to be nice to some random woman for the rest of my life because she’s the mother of his child. Did I ever tell you he asked me out on a date back in February? Not that he actually wanted to go out with me, I think he was just trying to boost my self-esteem. Although, we did have a very funny phone call last night . . .
Anyway: what age is Felix? Is he an old mystic man who writes you poetry about the cosmos? Or a nineteen-year-old county swimming champion with white teeth?