I wanted desperately for my life to be my own creation, to not have my present behaviour reduced to things that happened when I was young.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But that’s not all. Weeks after releasing their spawn, their bodies become soft and they disintegrate. They come apart in the same stream, saturating the water with nutrients so their young can grow fat on them.’ ‘Like cannibalism?’ ‘I suppose it is, indirectly.’ She smiled. ‘It’s not easy, you know, being a parent. I hope you know that. But I’m not just talking about families and children; I mean everyone. Everyone is a parent. That’s what getting old is: catastrophic senescence. That’s what dying is. You become a parent. You fall into the stream.’
The fact that this person could still be surprised by little things like this, someone considered to be old, seemed incongruous and unlikely, even absurd. She was still a child. We all were. This never changes, it never leaves us, this sense of beginning, of always beginning, of always being young.
Because I had no idea what my apartment would look like or how my bed would feel, my journey was imbalanced, and I felt as if I were leaving somewhere without a destination, travelling further and further without any prospect of arrival.
So while I waited in Departures, scanning the listings, gripping my luggage tightly at my knees, I tried to endorse the decision, tried to commit to it and feel the excitement of a new life just beginning.
Now I wondered again where I’d sleep, what the place would be like. There wasn’t much to go on: an apartment, an orientation, a lab. I’d given up my life – my job, my home, my partner – to come out to a place where I didn’t know a single person.
You’re tired, you’re hungry, you’re taking refuge in self-pity because it’s easy and it’s comfortable, pleasurable in its own way, and because it’s an excuse to avoid thinking more challenging and exciting thoughts, like the opportunity you’ve been given and what exactly it might mean.
The time at home was 06:00. I wanted her – I wanted someone, anyone – to stay awake and to miss me, having travelled all this way. The small routines I carried with me weren’t noted in their absence by anyone, and I regretted this. I moved from place to place – across a room, through a doorway, past a table – and I carried all this with me and it was not acknowledged. Everyone should be acknowledged. Everyone should be missed when they are not right there with you because of what they carry, this very distinct way they have of bearing themselves that is like no one else and that is built by everything they have done and everything they have seen. When that goes – even just a little way, through the doorway, the other side of the wall, even while you can still hear the movement taking place – it should be missed.
It amused me, the way even the most dramatic events snuck up on you, their true significance only apparent in retrospect. There was no single moment of transition; everything happened by degrees, each step seeming logical and reasonable at the time. This was a lesson I was unable to learn, despite a lifetime’s demonstration. The present, regardless of what it entails, almost always comes with an in-built inertia, a resolute, robust banality.
Age was, among so many other things, the realisation that you couldn’t correct this, that the pursuit wasn’t meaningful, there was no perfect clean reality on the other side. You’re flawed, and the world you see corresponds to these flaws. Weaknesses define you, drive new and original strategies to cover them, and they make you who you are.
I always suspected Uria over-promoted me for essentially personal reasons. But imposter syndrome, I realised early on in training, was tedious, and if I didn’t shake it I’d never see this through.
Even at the peak of it, the two of us quietly eating our sandwiches on the lawn on a plaid blanket, I couldn’t lose the sense that this was ending, that the more the experience developed, the more I lost it.
‘It’s a cheat code for god, Tyler. Therefore there is no god.’ ‘I disagree. It’s an artificial route to the transcendent, but it doesn’t undermine it. The state attained remains meaningful.’ ‘Then why practise religion at all? Why not use artificial routes – psilocybin, direct brain stimulation?’ ‘Because it’s not sustainable across a lifetime. And because the experience is richer when it’s internally derived. Reaching these states artificially is interesting, but the experience is only grafted on. When you have faith, however – when you build your life around it – everything’s charged from the inside. I realise I might not sound persuasive, and that’s OK. I don’t need to argue with you, K – not now. If this is the end, I think it would be a pity to meet it fighting one another.’ K moves his body, appears to concede something. ‘Were
You can’t picture it. You’ve never even seen a photograph of a ship’s interior. What does it feel like? How warm is it? What does the food taste like? Do you dream in space? How do you bathe? If you can’t relate to it, can’t conceive of the person being there, then a gap is created, and the mind exploits the reality chasm. The reason I can’t accept it is because it didn’t happen. If I can’t imagine what that world was like, it never existed.
The place can’t be imagined, therefore it can’t be substantial.
Leigh and Geert seemed equally awed by the shapeless and limitless expanse of the future, hence these absurd little rituals of anticipatory control, which Fenna often, without thinking, ultimately tidied away, so that all preparations counted for nothing in the end.
Both of them got anxious from the sheer scale of what lay beyond them. They reacted to this by trying to become independent, cutting themselves off from other people, strength expressed as attachment to the insignificant. Both of them were scared, but they would never have admitted this.
a cycle of transformation beginning. The possibility of life, mineral into organic, objects creating themselves in a frenzy of feeling, striving