Leave the World Behind

Parenthood was never knowing what was going to hurt your kids, but knowing only that something, inevitably, would.

Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos. There was only a collective faith in order.

You never know when a time is the last time, because if you did you could never go on with life.

Enjoying a moment is a victory.

People weren’t that connected to one another. Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to the movies or paying your taxes or fucking your wife or worrying about the mortgage.

They had asked themselves questions when they decided to have children — do we have the money, do we have the space, do we have what it takes — but they didn’t ask what the world would be when their children grew.

You told yourself there was an end to the worry. You told yourself it was sleeping through the night, then weaning from the breast, then walking then shoelaces then reading then algebra then sex then college admissions then you would be liberated, but this was a lie. Worry was infinite. A parent’s only task was to protect his child.

Theirs was a failure of imagination, though, two overlapping but private delusions. G. H. would have pointed out that the information had always been there waiting for them, in the gradual death of Lebanon’s cedars, in the disappearance of the river dolphin, in the renaissance of cold-war hatred, in the discovery of fission, in the capsizing vessels crowded with Africans. No one could plead ignorance that was not willful. You didn’t have to scrutinize the curve to know; you didn’t even have to read the papers, because our phones reminded us many times daily precisely how bad things had got. How easy to pretend otherwise.

If they didn’t know how it would end, with night, with more terrible noise from the top of Olympus, with bombs, with disease, with blood, with happiness, with deer or something else watching them from the darkened woods—well, wasn’t that true of every day?

It was like some tacit agreement; everyone had ceded to things just falling apart. That it was common knowledge that things were bad surely meant they were actually worse.

Life was like that; life was about change.

The world was over, so why not dance?

It’s the right thing to do.” Clay knew this would work; his wife felt it important, not to do the moral thing, necessarily, but to be the kind of person who would. Morality was vanity, in the end.

There was no way to explain that the thing about dark is that it’s rare. There’s always some ambient light. There’s always that contrast that helps you understand: This is dark. The pricks of stars, the leak beneath the door, the glow of an appliance, something. Wasn’t its ability to assert itself, and at breakneck speed at that, light’s most remarkable quality?

There was a point, when he was younger, where he’d dreamed of understanding grown-up conversation. Now he could, and realized he’d overestimated it.

Worry was infinite. A parent’s only task was to protect his child.

Home was just where you were, in the end. It was just the place where you found yourself.

She could have got into that bed and read a book. She might even have dozed in that indolent way you do when you’re in a vacation home—not for need of rest but because you can.

She wanted her colleagues to need her as God wants people to keep praying.

He kissed the worn cotton on Rose’s shoulder and regretted that he did not believe in prayer.

Fear was private. It was primal. It was something you guarded because you thought you could defuse it that way. How could they continue to love each other, having realized that they could not save each other?

She packed a book, as you never knew when you'd need a book.

She kept her silence and pictured the faces of her daughter and grandsons, the atheist’s prayer.

What the fuck?” This was, maybe, the only proper response. Amanda was not talking to George. She was not talking to anyone. “What the fuck?” She said it a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time, it didn’t matter. She kept saying it, and it was unanswered, as a prayer.

To enjoyment. To the enjoyment of vacations. To the enjoyment of any moment in life, I guess. Enjoying a moment is a victory. I think we need to hold on to those.

The building lacked a thirteenth floor because that was terrible luck. Simply pretending it wasn’t there was better.

He retrieved his cigarettes from the glove box, wincing at the gravel. He sat on the front lawn in the shade of a tree and smoked. He should feel bad about this, but tobacco was the foundation of the nation. Smoking tethered you to history itself! It was a patriotic act, or once had been, anyway, like owning slaves or killing the Cherokee.