Sublime

I lost my faith,’ said Thomas, ‘I don’t know where I’ve put it, and now my house is empty and I live alone.’

“I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped. Dan’s like that.”

He was swearing at her and at himself. She looked him in the face, intent on discovering some tiny trace of grace, some snatch of goodness . . .

Even Henry and Caroline, whom she saw every day, were half hidden under their accumulations – accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience. They were carpeted with experience. No new event could set jarring foot on them but they would absorb and muffle the impact. If the boiler burst, if a policeman climbed in at the window waving a swo

fugacious

She could plant a forest inside herself.

Hope, writes the moral philosopher Kieran Setiya,18 “keeps the flicker of potential agency alive.”

And he saw then: no matter how far you have come, you can never be further than right where you are.