A History of Loneliness

But once, in his anger, Aidan had asked me whether I thought I had wasted my life, and I had told him no. No, I had not. But I had been wrong. And Tom Cardle has been right. For I had known everything, right from the start, and never acted on any of it. I had blocked it from my mind time and again, refused to recognize what was staring me in the face. I had said nothing when I should have spoken out, convincing myself that I was a man of higher character. I had been complicit in all their crimes, and people had suffered because of me. I had wasted my life. I had wasted every moment of my life. And the final irony was that it had taken a convicted pedophile to show me that in my silence, I was just as guilty as the rest of them.

The sensation that for the world to exist with an object of such beauty in it—and for that object to be unattainable—was the very sweetest kind of pain imaginable.

How can something still feel so painful after twenty-eight years, I asked myself. Is there no recovery from the traumas of our youth?

I have always been a lover of the sun, even if, through spending a lifetime in Ireland, I have had little personal connection with it.

But then I didn’t know what I was giving up until it was already gone. No one ever does, do they?

I did not have any ambitions toward climbing any ladder. The truth was that if I had a vocation, which Mam had said that I had, then I wanted to explore it privately. I wanted to understand who I was and why I had been chosen for this life and what I could offer the world from within it. That did not seem to me to be a bad ambition in itself.

I didn’t know what I was giving up until it was already gone. No one ever does, do they?

I knew that by staying silent, I was as guilty as everyone else...

Remember, my young friend, life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practise.’ He winked at me. ‘Forster.

The people are as bad, do you hear me? But the priests are still in control of ninety per cent of the schools. Do you think that if there was any other sector of society which has displayed such a predilection towards paedophilia we would let them within a mile of a school, let alone let them run the places? I mean what kind of country do we have here at all? We need to get rid of them, do you hear me? Put them out of every school. Keep them away from our children. Perversion is bred in their bones.

Odran, you may never believe anything I tell you again, but believe this: you have no idea what you're talking about. None. You don't have the first concept of what my childhood was like. Of all the things that happened to me in the years before I arrived at Clonliffe. None.' 'And I don't want to know," I told him. 'Nothing that happened to you back then makes anything that you did acceptable. It doesn't justify anything. Can't you see that?

...the priests said that food was not there to be enjoyed but simply to keep us alive. Simplicity of diet was important.