(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
Interpretation
Grief leaves lasting marks on our lives, changing us fundamentally over time.
Julian Barnes reflects on the nature of grief in a poignant way, suggesting that while we eventually emerge from our sorrow, we do so carrying indelible scars. Unlike a clean escape from a tunnel, our recovery resembles a gull struggling to break free from an oil slick, signifying that although healing occurs, we are forever altered by the experience of loss.
In practice
In a speech about overcoming adversity, you might quote this to illustrate the long-lasting impact of grief.
Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses endurate. Both go mouldy.
It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.
But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.
And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It's been interesting to me, though I wouldn't complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand. [pp.60-61]
Every love story is a potential grief story.
He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.
Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.
I'm going to go home. Everything is going to be normal again. Boring again. Wonderful again.
One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second
People look with sympathetic eyes only at the blossom and the fruit, and disregard the long period of transition during which the one is ripening into the other.
Your life is meant to be an epic story. How you think, perform and live today is part of that script.
I've been praying to God to show me how to forgive myself. Because... maybe... that's the thing I've been searching for.
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