My world

My world begins with the leisurely concentration of a woman selecting a belt to go with her dress…There, there everything strikes one by its bewitching evidence, by the simplicity of perfect good; there everything pleases one’s soul, everything is filled with the kind of fun that children know; there shines the mirror that now and then sends a chance reflection here.

Note: expressions taken from Vladimir Nabokov's *Invitation to a beheading*

l'histoire d'un drapeau

Like ideas, when they are floating around, and an orchestrator shows up in your mind. The savvy orcherstrator, aware of the rules of Language, puts some aside and connects the rest. Just like that, last night I thought of my country's flag

A Good Death

* What's your name?

*You are silent. I was just trying to see your eyes when you say it. You know I know your name.

-Why?

*Now, that you know that you have always known it. Why the question?

-Questioning is life.

*Or death.

-Well, I think my answer is fear.

*You know it's an illusion.

-But, time!

*That is real.

-Yes! You know! Sometimes I feel like I am a visitor from the future, who, by mere accident, lost the memory of his home; and is trying, by seeking traces of civilization, to recreate it. Even that last thought is dead.

*A good death.

-How?

*Listen, Fear and Time are your enemies, and you mustn't allow an enemy to see your eyes without a sense of intimidation.

-That also is an illusion.

*Try to understand! Everyone is committed to illusions. But, only the ones who make their own, can become real.

-But, not true!

*Maybe! Maybe your home is.

I still remember, the day we met. The school, kids, and the soccer ball. I can see him there, as true as I thought he would be. In his mind, I can see a drifted mind. Wait! I can see his fear. As a long standing snow flake waiting to melt in early-spring, he was waiting. Silent, in a time where language had only one word. Unlike truth, she said, Ideas can be created and killed in our minds. I painted a school, kids, a soccer ball, and a crown. I painted a road, I walked. I painted rocks, snakes, and a clever young boy. Stumbled, beaten by a toy!

Unlike Ideas, she said, with me, you can only hope for a good dance. I still remember, I still do, Hope! Il y'a longtemps que je t'aime, jamais, je ne t'oublierai.

A weakness that can not find a cure. Illusion de ne pouvior jamais oublier cette allure. In pursuit of a mind that remains pure. I missed sunlight, for then, I was insecure.

I hold myself guilty of letting guilt crawl into my thoughts and hide your persisting beautiful image. At those few moments when I beat my fear, I see you in those first red rays of the sun at dawn, in the raging waves of a deep blue sea. In that hopeful and sharp look of a child, in that only place where I can see an unquestionable truth. I see you in my mind, gazing at me, with that all-secure, from-all protecting look. If I ever close my mind in fear again, rest your eyes in mine, so that it opens.

Note: Some of the sentences are highly affected by already published books. In particular, *Invitation to a Beheading* by Vladimir Nabokov, and *1984* by George Orewell.

A final act of kindness

That's the ending paragraph of the novel *Atonement* by Ian Mcewan.

*There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all. since I wrote my little play. or rather, I've made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tied to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect mean, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them in that year. That my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. That the letters the lovers wrote are in the archives of the War Museum. How could that constitute an ending? What sense or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn't do it to them. I'm too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of fogetting, and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions. Briony will be as much of a fantasy as the lovers who shared a bed i Balham and enraged their landlady. No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. I know there's always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.

The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

I've been standing at the window, feeling waves of tiredness beat the remaining strength from my body. The floor seems to be undulating beneath my feet. I've been watching the first light bring into view the part and the beidges over the vanished lake. And the long narrow driveway down which the drove Robbie away into the whiteness. I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, nut I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration...Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It's not impossible.

But now I must sleep.