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London In The '70s Was A Pretty Catastrophic Dump, I Can Tell You. We Had Every Kind Of Industrial Trouble; We Had Severe Energy Problems; We Were Under Constant Terrorist Attack From Irish Terrorist Groups Who Had Started A Bombing Campaign In English Cities; Politics Were Fantastically Polarized Between Left And Right.

-Ian Mcewan

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London In The '70s

Ian Mcewan

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London In The '70s Was A Pretty Catastrophic Dump, I Can Tell You. We Had Every Kind Of Industrial Trouble; We Had Severe Energy Problems; We Were Under Constant Terrorist Attack From Irish Terrorist Groups Who Had Started A Bombing Campaign In English Cities; Politics Were Fantastically Polarized Between Left And Right.

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Terrorist Groups

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In A Story You Only Had To Wish, You Only Had To Write It Down And You Could Have The World...it Seemed So Obvious Now That It Was Too Late: A Story Was A Form Of Telepathy. By Means Of Inking Symbols Onto A Page, She Was Able To Send Thoughts And Feelings From Her Mind To Her Reader's. It Was A Magical Process, So Commonplace That No One Stopped To Wonder At It. Reading A Sentence And Understanding It Were The Same Thing; As With The Crooking Of A Finger, Nothing Lay Between Them. There Was No Gap During Which The Symbols Were Unraveled.

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There's A Taste In The Air, Sweet And Vaguely Antiseptic, That Reminds Him Of His Teenage Years In These Streets, And Of A General State Of Longing, A Hunger For Life To Begin That From This Distance Seems Like Happiness.

The Anticipation And Dread He Felt At Seeing Her Was Also A Kind Of Sensual Pleasure, And Surrounding It, Like An Embrace, Was A General Elation--it Might Hurt, It Was Horribly Inconvenient, No Good Might Come Of It, But He Had Found Out For Himself What It Was To Be In Love, And It Thrilled Him.

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In A Nuclear Age, And In An Age Of Serious Environmental Degradation, Apocalyptic Belief Creates A Serious Second Order Danger. The Precarious Logic Of Self-interest That Saw Us Through The Cold War Would Collapse If The Leaders Of One Nuclear State Came To Welcome, Or Ceased To Fear Mass Death.

I'm Not Against Religion In The Sense That I Feel I Can't Tolerate It, But I Think Written Into The Rubric Of Religion Is The Certainty Of Its Own Truth. And Since There Are 6,000 Religions Currently On The Face Of The Earth, They Can't All Be Right. And Only The Secular Spirit Can Guarantee Those Freedoms And It's The Secular Spirit That They Contest.

You Can Spin Stories Out Of The Ways People Understand And Misunderstand Each Other.

Reading Groups, Readings, Breakdowns Of Book Sales All Tell The Same Story: When Women Stop Reading, The Novel Will Be Dead.

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Now, I'm An Atheist. I Really Don't Believe For A Moment That Our Moral Sense Comes From A God.

The Cost Of Oblivius Daydreaming Was Always This Moment Of Return, The Realigment With What Had Been Before And Now Seemed A Little Worse. Her Reverie, Once Rich In Plausible Details, Had Become A Passing Silliness Before The Hard Mass Of The Actual. It Was Difficult To Come Back.

What Was It With Men, That They Found Elementary Logic So Difficult?

...the World She Ran Through Loved Her And Would Give Her What She Wanted And Would Let It Happen.

It Is Photography Itself That Creates The Illusion Of Innocence. Its Ironies Of Frozen Narrative Lend To Its Subjects An Apparent Unawareness That They Will Change Or Die. It Is The Future They Are Innocent Of. Fifty Years On We Look At Them With The Godly Knowledge Of How They Turne Dout After All - Who They Married, The Date Of Their Death - With No Thought For Who Will One Day Be Holding Photographs Of Us.

He Never Believed In Fate Or Providence, Or The Future Being Made By Someone In The Sky. Instead, At Every Instant, A Trillion Trillion Possible Futures; The Pickiness Of Pure Chance And Physical Laws Seemed Like Freedom From The Scheming Of A Gloomy God.

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He Saw That No One Owned Anything Really. It's All Rented, Or Borrowed. Our Possessions Will Outlast Us, We'll Desert Them In The End.

When We Go On About The Big Things, The Political Situation, Global Warming, World Poverty, It All Looks Really Terrible, With Nothing Getting Better, Nothing To Look Forward To. But When I Think Small, Closer In - You Know, A Girl I've Just Met, Or This Song We're Going To Do With Chas, Or Snowboarding Next Month, Then It Looks Great. So This Is Going To Be My Motto - Think Small.

At That Moment, The Urge To Be Writing Was Stronger Than Any Notion She Had Of What She Might Write.

She Lay In The Dark And Knew Everything.

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We Knew So Little About Eachother. We Lay Mostly Submerged, Like Ice Floes With Our Visible Social Selves Projecting Only Cool And White. Here Was A Rare Sight Below The Waves, Of A Man's Privacy And Turmoil, Of His Dignity Upended By The Overpowering Necessity Of Pure Fantasy, Pure Thought, By The Irreducible Human Element - Mind.

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Come Back, Come Back To Me

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Daylight Seemed Then To Be The Physical Manifestation Of Common Sense.

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I Like To Think That It Isn't Weakness Or Evasion, But A Final Act Of Kindness, A Stand Against Oblivion And Despair.

How Guilt Refined The Methods Of Self-torture, Threading The Beads Of Detail Into An Eternal Loop, A Rosary To Be Fingered For A Lifetime.

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Nothing Was To Be Lost By Beginning At The Beginning.

Finally, You Had To Measure Yourself By Other People - There Really Was Nothing Else. Every Now And Then, Quite Unintentionally, Someone Taught You Something About Yourself.

She Had Lolled About For Three Years At Girton With The Kind Of Books She Could Equally Have Read At Home--jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, All In The Library Downstairs, In Complete Sets. How Had That Pursuit, Reading The Novels That Others Took As Their Leisure, Let Her Think She Was Superior To Anyone Else?

The Trouble With Being A Daydreamer Who Doesn’t Say Much Is That The Teachers At School, Especially Those Who Don’t Know You Very Well, Are Likely To Think You’re Rather Stupid. Or, If Not Stupid, Then Dull. No One Can See The Amazing Things That Are Going On In Your Head.

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It Wasn't Only Wickedness And Scheming That Made People Unhappy, It Was Confusion And Misunderstanding; Above All, It Was The Failure To Grasp The Simple Truth That Other People Are As Real As You.

Dearest Cecilia, You’d Be Forgiven For Thinking Me Mad, The Way I Acted This Afternoon. The Truth Is I Feel Rather Light Headed And Foolish In Your Presence, Cee, And I Don’t Think I Can Blame The Heat.

The Evasions Of Her Little Novel Were Exactly Those Of Her Life. Everything She Did Not Wish To Confront Was Also Missing From Her Novella--and Was Necessary To It.

She Bent Her Finger And Then Straightened It. The Mystery Was In The Instant Before It Moved, The Dividing Moment Between Not Moving And Moving, When Her Intention Took Effect. It Was Like A Wave Breaking. If She Could Only Find Herself At The Crest, She Thought, She Might Find The Secret Of Herself, That Part Of Her That Was Really In Charge. She Brought Her Forefinger Closer To Her Face And Stared At It, Urging It To Move. It Remained Still Because She Was Pretending... . And When She Did Crook It Finally, The Action Seemed To Start In The Finger Itself, Not In Some Part Of Her Mind.

You Can Tell A Lot From A Person's Nails. When A Life Starts To Unravel, They're Among The First To Go.

Novels Without Female Characters Were A Lifeless Desert.

Writing A Novel Resembles A Journey With Only The Sketchiest Of Maps.

Looking After Children Is One Of The Ways Of Looking After Yourself.

She Loved Him, Though Not At This Particular Moment.

Briony Began To Understand The Chasm That Lay Between An Idea And Its Execution.

...falling In Love Could Be Achieved In A Single Word—a Glance.

Falling In Love

When He Thought Of Her, It Rather Amazed Him, That He Had Let That Girl With Her Violin Go. Now, Of Course, He Saw That Her Self-effacing Proposal Was Quite Irrelevant. All She Had Needed Was The Certainty Of His Love, And His Reassurance That There Was No Hurry When A Lifetime Lay Ahead Of Them. Love And Patience- If Only He Had Had Them Both At Once- Would Surely Have Seen Them Both Through.

But What Really Happened? The Answer Is Simple: The Lovers Survive And Flourish.

And Though You Think The World Is At Your Feet, It Can Rise Up And Tread On You.

Novels Help Us To Resist The Temptation To Think Of The Past As Deficient.

When Its Gone, You'll Know What A Gift Love Was. You'll Suffer Like This. So Go Back And Fight To Keep It.

Arguing With A Dead Man In A Lavatory Is A Claustrophobic Experience.

Was Everyone Else Really As Alive As She Was?...if The Answer Was Yes, Then The World, The Social World, Was Unbearably Complicated, With Two Billion Voices, And Everyone's Thoughts Striving In Equal Importance And Everyone's Claim On Life As Intense, And Everyone Thinking They Were Unique, When No One Was.

She Wanted To Leave, She Wanted To Lie Alone Face Down On Her Bed And Savor The Vile Piquancy Of The Moment, And Go Back Down The Lines Of Branching Consequences To The Point Before The Destruction Began. She Needed To Contemplate With Eyes Closed The Full Richness Of What She Had Lost, What She Had Given Away, And To Anticipate The New Regime.

What Is It Precisely, That Feeling Of 'returning' From A Poem? Something Is Lighter, Softer, Larger - Then It Fades, But Never Completely.

Without A Revolution Of The Inner Life, However Slow, All Our Big Designs Are Worthless. The Work We Have To Do Is With Ourselves If We're Ever Going To Be At Peace With Each Other...the Good That Flows From It Will Shape Our Societies In An Unprogrammed, Unforeseen Way, Under The Control Of No Single Group Of People Or Set Of Ideas.

I Believe The Novella Is The Perfect Form Of Prose Fiction.

She Sleepwalked From Moment To Moment, And Whole Months Slipped By Without Memory, Without Bearing The Faintest Imprint Of Her Conscious Will.

Someone Once Asked Me "if Your Life Could Be Extended To 150 And You Could Start Another Career, Would You?" And I Said "no, Thanks, I Think I'll Stick At This."

He Was Looking At Her With Amused Suspicion. There Was Something Between Them, And Even She Had To Acknowledge That A Tame Remark About The Weather Sounded Perverse.

How Easily This Unthinking Family Love Was Forgotten.

What Is Lawful Is Not Always Identical To What Is Right.

For Children, Childhood Is Timeless. It Is Always The Present. Everything Is In The Present Tense. Of Course, They Have Memories. Of Course, Time Shifts A Little For Them And Christmas Comes Round In The End. But They Don't Feel It. Today Is What They Feel, And When They Say 'when I Grow Up,' There Is Always An Edge Of Disbelief - How Could They Ever Be Other Than What They Are?

The World Should Take Note: Not Everything Is Getting Worse.

This Is How The Entire Course Of A Life Can Be Changed - By Doing Nothing.

I've Yet To Meet Somebody Who Said, 'your Stories Are So Revolting I Couldn't Read Them.'

The Luxury Of Being Half-asleep, Exploring The Fringes Of Psychosis In Safety.

I've Always Thought Cruelty Is A Failure Of Imagination.

You Enter A State Of Controlled Passivity, You Relax Your Grip And Accept That Even If Your Declared Intention Is To Justify The Ways Of God To Man, You Might End Up Interesting Your Readers Rather More In Satan.

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It Was Common Enough, To See So Much Death And Want A Child. Common, Therefore Human, And He Wanted It All The More. When The Wounded Were Screaming, You Dreamed Of Sharing A Little House Somewhere, Of An Ordinary Life, A Family Line, Connection.

It Is Quite Impossible These Days To Assume Anything About People's Educational Level From The Way They Talk Or Dress Or From Their Taste In Music. Safest To Treat Everyone You Meet As A Distinguished Intellectual.

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All She Had Needed Was The Certainty Of His Love, And His Reassurance That There Was No Hurry When A Lifetime Lay Ahead Of Them.

However, Withered, I Still Feel Myself To Be Exactly The Same Person I've Always Been. Hard To Explain That To The Young. We May Look Truly Reptilian, But We're Not A Separate Tribe.

He Had Never Before Felt So Self-consciously Young, Nor Experienced Such Appetite, Such Impatience For The Story To Begin.

And She Did Not Miss His Presence So Much As His Voice On The Phone. Even Being Lied To Constantly, Though Hardly Like Love, Was Sustained Attention; He Must Care About Her To Fabricate So Elaborately And Over Such A Long Stretch Of Time. His Deceit Was A Form Of Tribute To The Importance Of Their Marriage.

In That Shrinking Moment He Discovered That He Had Never Hated Anyone Until Now. It Was A Feeling As Pure As Love, But Dispassionate And Icily Rational.

It Troubles Him To Consider The Powerful Currents And Fine-tuning That Alter Fate, The Close And Distant Influences, The Accidents Of Character And Circumstance.

By Measuring Individual Human Worth, The Novelist Reveals The Full Enormity Of The State

It Is Shaming Sometimes How The Body Will Not, Or Cannot, Lie About Emotions. Who, For Decorum’s Sake, Has Ever Slowed His Heart, Or Muted A Blush?

I Like To Think That Each Book I Start Is A Completely New Departure But I’ve Learned That Whatever You Do, Readers Will Have No Difficulty Assimilating It Into What You’ve Done Before.

She Would Simply Wait On The Bridge, Calm And Obstinate, Until Events, Real Events, Not Her Own Fantasies, Roe To Her Challenge, And Dispelled Her Insignificance.

Love Doesn't Grow At A Steady Rate, But Advances In Surges, Bolts, Wild Leaps, And This Was One Of Those.

Let The Guilty Bury The Innocent, And Let No One Change The Evidence

In Leon's Account Of His Life, No-one Was Mean-spirited, No-one Schemed Or Lied Or Betrayed; Everyone Was Celebrated At Least In Some Degree... Leon Turned Out To Be A Spineless, Grinning Idiot.

He's Never Quite Got The Trick Of Conversation, Tending To Hear In Dissenting Views, However Mild, A Kind Of Affront, An Invitation To Mortal Combat.

The Moment You Lose Curiosity In The World, You Might As Well Be Dead.

It Is Not The First Duty Of The Novelist To Provide Blueprints For Insurrection, Or Uplifting Tales Of Successful Resistance For The Benefit Of The Opposition. The Naming Of What Is There Is What Is Important.

It Wasn't Torpor That Kept Her - She Was Often Restless To The Point Of Irritability. She Simply Liked To Feel That She Was Prevented From Leaving, That She Was Needed.

Rebecca Goldstein Is A Rare Find Among Contemporary Novelists: She Has Intellectual Muscle As Well As A Tender Emotional Reach.

When There Are No Consequences, Being Wrong Is Simply A Diversion.

What Reader Wants To Be Told What Attitude To Strike?

At The Back Of My Mind I Had A Sense Of Us Sitting About Waiting For Some Terrible Event, And Then I Would Remember That It Had Already Happened.

Terrible Events

How Can A Novelist Achieve Atonement When, With Her Absolute Power Of Deciding Outcomes, She Is Also God?

Watching Him During The First Several Minutes Of His Delivery, Cecilia Felt A Pleasant Sinking Sensation In Her Stomach As She Contemplated How Deliciously Self-destructive It Would Be, Almost Erotic, To Be Married To A Man So Nearly Handsome, So Hugely Rich, So Unfathomably Stupid. He Would Fill Her With His Big-faced Children, All Of Them Loud, Boneheaded Boys With A Passion For Guns And Football And Aeroplanes.

Not Everything People Did Could Be In A Correct, Logical Order, Especially When They Were Alone.

Shall There Be Womanly Times? Or Shall We Die?

Was It Possible That I Was, In The Modern Term, In Denial?

One Important Theme Is The Extent To Which One Can Ever Correct An Error, Especially Outside Any Frame Of Religious Forgiveness. All Of Us Have Done Something We Regret - How We Manage To Remove That From Our Conscience, Or Whether That's Even Possible, Interested Me.

I'm Quite Good At Not Writing.

He Would Work Through The Night And Sleep Until Lunch. There Wasn't Really Much Else To Do. Make Something, And Die.

When People Ask, "is There Any Advice You'd Give A Young Writer?," I Say Write Short Stories. They Afford Lots Of Failure. Pastiche Is A Great Way To Start.

Is There Any Meaning In My Life That The Inevitable Death Awaiting Me Does Not Destory?

Inevitable Death

Nothing That Can Be, Can Come Between Me And The Full Prospect Of My Hopes.

Oblivion Seemed The Only Reasonable Option.

My Biggest Fear, I Think Falling From A Great Height. If I Want To Keep Myself Awake At Night I Imagine I'm On The Top Of The North Or South Tower In 9/11, Wondering Whether I'm Going To Be Burnt To Death Or I'm Going To Jump. And I Think I Would Burn To Death. And Yet I'm Impressed By The Fact That Hundreds Didn't.

These Were Everyday Sounds Magnified By Darkness. And Darkness Was Nothing - It Was Not A Substance, It Was Not A Presence, It Was No More Than An Absence Of Light.

No Emergency Was Ever Dealt With Effectively By Democratic Process.

From This New And Intimate Perspective, She Learned A Simple, Obvious Thing She Had Always Known, And Everyone Knew; That A Person Is, Among All Else, A Material Thing, Easily Torn, Not Easily Mended.

Not Being Boring Is Quite A Challenge.

I Don't Believe There's Any Inherent Darkness At The Center Of Religion At All. I Think Religion Actually Is A Morally Neutral Force.

Politics Is The Enemy Of The Imagination.

But How To Do Feelings? All Very Well To Write "she Felt Sad", Or Describe What A Sad Person Might Do, But What Of Sadness Itself, How Was That Put Across So It Could Be Felt In All Its Lowering Immediacy? Even Harder Was The Threat, Or The Confusion Of Feeling Contradictory Things.

I Was The Basest Of Readers. All I Wanted Was My Own World, And Myself In It, Given Back To Me In Artful Shapes And Accessible Form.

I Watched Our Friends' Wary, Intelligent Faces Droop At Our Tale. Their Shock Was A Mere Shadow Of Our Own, Resembling More The Goodwilled Imitation Of That Emotion, And For This Reason It Was A Temptation To Exaggerate, To Throw A Rope Of Superlatives Across The Abyss That Divided Experience From Its Representation By Anecdote.

This Commonplace Cycle Of Falling Asleep And Waking, In Darkness, Under Private Cover, With Another Creature, A Pale Soft Tender Mammal, Putting Faces Together In A Ritual Of Affection, Briefly Settled In The Eternal Necessities Of Warmth, Comfort, Safety, Crossing Limbs To Draw Nearer - A Simple Daily Consolation, Almost Too Obvious, Easy To Forget By Daylight.

None Of Us Really Either Know The Circumstances Of Our Death Or Are Likely To Exert As Much Control Over It As We Would Like To, But We Can Certainly Have A Little More Say In It If We Are Terminally Ill Than We Have At The Moment. That's The Element Of Dignity, But Sure, Life Is Very Hard To Organise Even When You Are Fit And Healthy.

Oh, I've Become Immune To The Booker. I Think We Need Something A Little More Like The Pulitzer Prize, Where There Isn't This Great Race.

A Twenty-one-year-old Writer Is Likely To Be Inhibited By A Lack Of Usable Experience. Childhood And Adolescence Were Something I Knew.

I Read In Announcements Of Deaths 'peacefully In His Sleep' And I Wonder How Many Of Those Are True. Maybe They Are Just Conventional. I Hope They Are True Whenever I Read It Of Someone. [but] I Would Rather Be Awake. Peacefully Awake, Brim Full Of Some Calming Drug That Was Seeing Me Out Of The Door, Having Said My Farewells.

I Don't Hold Grudges.

Four Or Five Years - Nothing At All. But No One Over Thirty Could Understand This Peculiarly Weighted And Condensed Time, From Late Teens To Early Twenties, A Stretch Of Life That Needed A Name, From School Leaver To Salaried Professional, With A University And Affairs And Death And Choices In Between. I Had Forgotten How Recent My Childhood Was, How Long And Inescapable It Once Seemed. How Grown Up And How Unchanged I Was.

Especially Difficult When The First And Best Unconscious Move Of A Dedicated Liar Is To Persuade Himself He's Sincere. And Once He's Sincere, All Deception Vanishes.

...beauty, She Had Discovered Occupied A Narrow Band. Ugliness, On The Hand, Had Infinite Variation.

A Story Lives Transformed By A Gesture Not Made Or A Word Not Spoken

The Best Way To Tell People About Climate Change Is Through Non-fiction. There's A Vast Literature Of Outstanding Writing On The Subject.

I'm Going Mad, I Told Myself. Let Me Not Be Mad.

He Knew These Last Lines By Heart And Mouthed Them Now In The Darkness. My Reason For Life. Not Living, But Life. That Was The Touch. And She Was His Reason For Life, And Why He Must Survive.

A Story Was A Form Of Telepathy. By Means Of Inking Symbols Onto A Page, She Was Able To Send Thoughts And Feelings From Her Mind To Her Reader's. It Was A Magical Process, So Commonplace That No One Stopped To Wonder At It.

And Now She Was Back In The World, Not One She Could Make, But The One That Had Made Her, And She Felt Herself Shrinking Under The Early Evening Sky. She Was Weary Of Being Outdoors, But She Was Not Ready To Go In. Was That Really All There Was In Life, Indoors Or Out? Wasn't There Somewhere Else For People To Go?

For The Professors In The Academy, For The Humanities Generally, Misery Is More Amenable To Analysis: Happiness Is A Harder Nut To Crack.

She Returned His Gaze, Struck By The Sense Of Her Own Transformation, And Overwhelmed By The Beauty Which A Lifetime Havit Had Taught Her To Ignore.

I Think The Americans Are Dying To Leave Iraq. I Was Against The War But Longed For The Fall Of Saddam; The Decision To Go To War Clearly Was Taken Long Before The Matter Reached The U.n., Given Its Inevitability. I Kept My Fingers Crossed For The Emergence Of Democracy In Iraq Even If That Would Mean Victory For A Man Whose Politics I Have Little Sympathy With.

And Feeling Clever, I've Always Thought, Is Just A Sigh Away From Being Cheerful.

One Has To Have The Courage Of One's Pessimism.

In A Language As Idiomatically Stressed As English, Opportunities For Misreadings Are Bound To Arise. By A Mere Backward Movement Of Stress, A Verb Can Become A Noun, An Act A Thing. To Refuse, To Insist On Saying No To What You Believe Is Wrong, Becomes At A Stroke Refuse, An Insurmountable Pile Of Garbage.

Self-consciousness Is The Destroyer Of Erotic Joy.

Cecilia Wondered, As She Sometimes Did When She Met A Man For The First Time, If This Was The One She Was Going To Marry, And Whether It Was This Particular Moment She Would Remember For The Rest Of Her Life - With Gratitude, Or Profound And Particular Regret.

That Love Which Does Not Build A Foundation On Good Sense Is Doomed.

But To Do Its Noticing And Judging, Poetry Balances Itself On The Pinprick Of The Moment. Slowing Down, Stopping Yourself Completely, To Read And Understand A Poem Is Like Trying To Acquire An Old-fashioned Skill.

I Think The Novel, Its Business Is The Investigation Of Human Nature.

I Don't Really Believe In Evil At All.

Above All, She Wanted To Look As Though She Had Not Given The Matter A Moment's Thought, And That Would Take Time.

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