And you can believe me, because none of my boyfriends have ever liked you, and it never made any difference to me.
He was laughing then, they both were. At midnight she went to brush her teeth and he turned the lights off in the kitchen. Emerging from the bathroom she said: See, I obviously had an ulterior motive, because I brought my toothbrush. She followed him into his room and he shut the door behind them, saying something inaudible. She laughed, and through the door her laughter was softened and musical. In the darkness the main room of the apartment lay quiet again and still. Two empty bowls had been left in the sink, two spoons, an empty water glass with a faint print of clear lip balm on the rim. Through the door the sound of conversation murmured on, the words rounded out, indistinct, and by one in the morning silence had fallen. At half past five the sky began
to lighten in the east-facing living room window, from black to blue and then to silvery white. Another day. The call of a crow from an overhead power line. The sound of buses in the street.
16
Alice, do you remember a few weeks or months ago I sent you an email about the Late Bronze Age collapse? I went on reading about it afterwards, and it seems that while little is known about the period, scholarly interpretations are more various than the Wikipedia page led me to believe. We do know that before the collapse, rich and literate palace economies in the Eastern Mediterranean traded in exorbitantly costly goods, apparently sending and receiving them as gifts to and from the rulers of other kingdoms.
And we also know that afterwards, palaces were destroyed or abandoned, written languages were lost, and luxury goods were no longer produced in the same quantities or traded across the same distances. But how many people, how many inhabitants of this ‘civilisation’, actually lived in the palaces? How many wore the jewellery, drank from the bronze cups, ate the pomegranates? For every one member of the elite, thousands more were illiterate and impoverished subsistence farmers. After the
‘collapse of civilisation’, many of them moved elsewhere, and some may have died, but for the most part their lives probably did not change much. They went on growing crops. Sometimes the harvest was good and sometimes it wasn’t. And in another corner of the continent, those people were your ancestors and mine – not the palace-dwellers, but the peasants. Our rich and complex international networks of production and distribution have come to an end before, but here we are, you and I, and here is humanity. What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal – the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms?
What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always – just to live and be with other people?
As to the revelation about yourself and Felix: may I say, as your friend, for all your earlier talk about relational formlessness and experimental affective bonds, this did not come as a surprise to me at all. If he’s nice to you I will approve of him unconditionally, and if he’s not then I’ll be his enemy forever. Does that sound reasonable? But I’m sure he’ll be nice.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this to you before, but a few years ago, I started keeping a diary, which I called ‘the life book’. I began with the idea of writing one short entry each day, just a line or two, describing something good. I suppose by ‘good’ I must have meant something that made me happy or brought me pleasure. I went back to look at it the other day, and the early entries are all from that autumn, almost six years ago now. Dry upturned sycamore leaves scuttling like claws along the South Circular Road.
The artificial buttered taste of popcorn in the cinema. Pale-yellow sky in the evening, Thomas Street draped in mist. Things like that. I didn’t miss a day through all of September, October, November that year. I could always think of something nice, and sometimes I would even do things for the purpose of putting them in the book, like taking a bath or going for a walk. At the time I felt like I was just absorbing life, and at the end of the day I never had to strain to think of anything good I had seen or heard. It just came to me, and even the words came, because my only aim was to get the image down clearly and simply so that I would later remember how it felt. And reading those entries now, I do remember what I felt, or at least what I saw and heard and noticed.
Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things – I mean just the things that were in front of me. People’s faces, the weather, traffic. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things. And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. There was
something delicate about living like that – like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.