The Break

It isn’t simply that rules are made to be broken: the rules tell you that there is something to break. If there was no law it would be impossible to transgress. The rules, whatever else they are, are an invitation to find out what rules are – and an invitation to find out what kind of person you are.

So much is done in Delacroix by purely formal means, coldly, with a kind of monstrous painterly calculation, to spell out what pain and fear truly feel like. Look at the geometry – the bare linear structure – of the horse’s head and its two black and white forelegs. It is an ideogram of a body at breaking point. 

Madness is fascinating to read about in literature, where it seems to provide a royal road through tragic downfall to moral salvation. But this is, of course, the world of art, where everything works out in the end, for better or worse, and everything fits together. Life, need we say, is not like that, since it just keeps on going on until one day it stops, generally of its own accord.

I will have three whole weeks alone in my flat. It hasn’t happened since L-i-L moved in. I have a scratchy feeling of excitement in my head as I anticipate the next 21 days. Is this true? There must be sadness at the break-up; am I telling myself lies? No. The sadness is there, all right, but in a different compartment from the excitement. I put both on hold until the clearing out is done.

What does courtship look like in a world where people worry about breaking up in light of how much they’ve ‘invested’ in a relationship? In which the ‘market rate’ of everyone – women especially – is as unarguable as a number? And how delicious is it to read a story in which neither of the lovers is particularly loveable, just as there’s nothing loveable about their environment.

There are many sources, from the Old Testament onwards, for Shakespeare’s understanding of an ocean that he may never have seen, or the ‘sea of air’ itself. But Horace, whose work he certainly knew, calls the sea ‘oceanus dissociabilis’, which means estranging. The sea is the greatest maker and breaker of all: random, deranging, the end and the beginning of human life.

Thatcherism as an ideological and economic system will almost certainly fail. The hopeless confusion of ends and means, the destructive tensions between its different strategies and the utterly utopian nature of the whole venture will see to that. But it will not fade away: in its deliquescence it may be as formidable as in its salad days.

When the revolt succeeds in its initial goal, we come to realise that what is really bothering us (our lack of freedom, our humiliation, corruption, poor prospects) persists in a new guise, so that we are forced to recognise that there was a flaw in the goal itself. This may mean coming to see that democracy can itself be a form of un-freedom, or that we must demand more than merely political democracy: social and economic life must be democratised too.

Walter Benjamin once remarked that what drove men and women to revolt was not dreams of liberated grandchildren but memories of oppressed ancestors. Visions of future happiness are all very well;...

She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway. Inside, it was tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted.