![]() ![]() ![]() “When I left England eighteen years ago, I didn’t know then how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have known? It’s one of time’s lessons, and can only be learned temporally. Death gives birth to the first question-Why?-and seems to kill all the answers.” At the very moment we play at being God, we also work against God, hurl down the script, refuse the terms of the drama, appalled by the meaninglessness and ephemerality of existence. It is just a life, one of millions, as arbitrary as everyone else’s, a named tenancy that will soon become a nameless one a life that we know, with horror, will be thoroughly forgotten within a few generations. But if this ability to see the whole of a life is God-like it also augurs a revolt against God: once a life is contained, made final, as if flattened within the pages of a diary, it becomes a smaller, contracted thing. We do not possess it with regard to our own lives. ![]() Grief doesn’t seem entitlement enough for the arrogation of the divine powers of beginning and ending. ![]() “The curious advantage of being able to survey the span of someone else’s life, from start to finish, can seem peremptory, high-handed, forward. ![]()
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