Ian McEwan, What We Can Know: A Novel
It was enough to observe and make a journal entry.
There was a fine account of it in a highly regarded book by P. Hughes-Hallett published in 2000.
Still, we know more about the twenty-first century than it knew about its own past. Specialists in literature pre-1990, like our university colleagues along the department corridor, know only as much about their writers of interest as scholars in Blundy’s time did. The wells, always meagre, were drunk dry long ago. For them, no new facts, only new angles. And still, they talk of their 500-year-old subjects, playwrights and poets, as if they knew them as neighbours. Up at our end, ‘Literature in English 1990 to 2030’, we have more facts and possibilities of interpretation than any of us could articulate in a dozen lifetimes. For the post-2030 crowd, which is most of the department, there’s even more. If civilisation manages to scrape through the next century as it scraped through the last, then we’ll need to find another hundred metres of corridor.
She had read too much. Everything was like something else. That was what weakened her hold on the real.
Our major libraries and museums are relatively safe at their various elevations.
He was well known for disliking country walks. Away from his study, he regretted the wasted time. Why walk when he could write?
She was putting notes together for a monograph in which she would describe a crisis in realism in fiction between 2015 and 2030.
Whenever humans got out of the way, the rest of the living world edged back and flourished. As for our precious universities, the kids we taught were inert, the culture fed them pap, and we were the elderly scolds, repeating the orthodoxies, the sacred canons, every year, just as we might have in the fifteenth century.
I surveyed the room from the doorway, reluctant to step back into the tangled lines of other people’s lives that I had foolishly made my own. I had been doing this too long. The Corona, even its long-dead author, even his entire era had no business squatting across so many of my best years. I was almost forty-five, a time when maturity and accumulated knowledge intersect with the last of youth’s lingering strength and quickness of mind. I should be doing something of my own. Something useful, for others. The loudmouths over in the Science and Technology building may have been right, the humanities were a waste of mental breath, of paper and ink, of entire lives. I sometimes compared myself and my colleagues along our corridor to medieval monks. But they at least were preserving a body of precious ancient knowledge that would one day stand against the violent tyranny of Christian thought. Whereas we were a diminishing band whose field, from Chaucer to Fisk, no one read but us. A thousand-year enterprise was turning to dust. It was history. History was history. Our students were right, the past was what they had to leave behind.
The various subjects had no proper theoretical underpinning. Their confident assertions were not subjected to conventional methods of proof. Published essays were not peer-reviewed. The best portion of the Humanities funding would be better spent in the Science departments.
A journal, whatever its quality, fixes events like beads on a string.
This novel had its origins in, and would not exist without, the magnificent, tender and technically brilliant poem by John Fuller, ‘Marston Meadows: A Corona for Prue’, a celebration of long love and nature, and a meditation on mortality. It was first published in the TLS on 9 July 2021 and is included in his collection Marston Meadows (Chatto & Windus, 2025). I am deeply indebted to Timothy Garton Ash, who pointed me towards the poem and, as so often before, gave wise counsel on an early draft of this novel. I am grateful to Richard Holmes for the epigraph that provided my title and for generously allowing me to summarise passages from Footsteps, his reflections on the biographer’s art. Craig Raine gave some excellent notes. My thanks to Stewart Brand and the Long Now Foundation for much deep thinking about what we owe the future.
Benjamin Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives
I need to think of something else to do with the rest of my life.
Brandon Taylor, Minor Black Figures
There was something obscene about a heterosexual man north of fifty trying very hard to fight his natural barrel chest and belly.
It was the sort of thing you could say only if you were accustomed to living your life as though it were a play or a podcast, the whole of your human idiom condensed into a vernacular of rudimentary sounds in slightly rhythmic repetition. It seemed awful, actually, but also, was that not the very definition of style? That pressurizing of the expressive capacity into a narrow channel or set of channels that communicated something about who you were or thought yourself to be.
Augustinus, Confessions
Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss. Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason.11 I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin.12 I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.
There is beauty in lovely physical objects, as in gold and silver and all other such things. When the body touches such things, much significance attaches to the rapport of the object with the touch.
Elizabeth McCracken, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction
A writing life, I’ve come to believe, is a yearslong process of casting away everything you once believed for sure.
the security blanket tradition.
A first line is only a demand for further attention, an invitation to the rest of the book.
Disorientation is one of the duties of fiction.
Write a manifesto aimed only at your own work without worrying whether it applies to or offends anybody else in the world.
Write a manifesto aimed only at your own work without worrying whether it applies to or offends anybody else in the world. Address, in your silent heart, punctuation, plot, character, all your picayune concerns and grandiose plans, all the things that made you want to be a writer. Make it living, an armor-clad list that might change. It will be dearer to you than any other guide.
I like thinking about fiction; I like talking to myself.
Be open to new fixations in life as well as writing.
Alan Moore, The Great When: A Long London Novel
He hadn’t worked for Coffin Ada long enough to be described as anything remotely like a bibliophile, but long enough to recognise the thrill such souls were seeking when a wholesale carton full of it erupted in his face. It wasn’t just the heady scent of vintage paper – which was anyway masked by a memory of soap flakes – but rather the radiant glamour of the books within that rose about him in an exhalation of desires hitherto unacknowledged. It was a charisma wrought of lovely and forgotten lettering styles inlaid on wan cloth boards, pervaded by implicit histories of publishing or personality and sodden with the ghost of a dead