Trains and Lovers: A Novel - Alexander McCall Smith
But for each person who is made happy by love, there will be many for whom it turns out to be a cause of regret. That is because it can be so fleeting; one moment it may take our breath away, the next it may leave us bereft. When it does that, love can be like a haunting, staying with us for year after year; we know tha it is gone, but somehow we persuade ourselves that it is still there. The heart has more than its fair share of ghosts, and these ghosts may be love, in any of its many forms.
Nobody would choose to be in love like that, to hold on so strongly to something that was no longer there. Yet we admire such instances of tenacity, finding nobility in loss and in the way in which some people bear it.
A friendship may be conceived in four hours; a short book finished and put away; a life remembered.
"Don't go through life giving up before you've even begun."
Oh yes, he said to himself. Oh yes, you do. You do. You think about somebody. He fills your world. He is all about you, a presence, and you think about him; you can't help it, because he's always there, in your thoughts. But you know, of course, that all the while you're thinking about him, he's not thinking about you. That's the hardest thing about it. That's what makes it so very, very hard to bear. So hard that sometimes you just sit there and let the misery wash over you; the misery, the emptiness. It's like a great white sea - one of those inland seas you see pictures of in the National Geographic; seas that are completely still, seas too salty to have waves or currents. Seas of tears.
The problem was that people pretended. It was not unlike the issue they were talking about earlier on - about the adequacy of effort and whether one could try to be brave. People tried to understand, and many did, but not everybody could make the imaginative leap that landed one in the position of another person, in their shoes, in their very garments, looking out on the world with their eyes, feeling what went on inside their hearts; being made to cry by the things that made them want to cry. That was easy in theoy, but hard in practice. They pretended to understand, but when it came down to it, many simply did not. They simply did not understand because they could not know - not really know - what it was like to be the other. That was because it was not them. That was why they could not think that. It had to be you.
"They don't feel it," said his father. "Lobsters don't feel things."
Adults lie, he thought. They lie about lobsters and a whole lot of other things.
The world is like that; memory has the effect of a telescope, making bigger the things we see through its lens, making them bigger than they really are.
Jenny: I think that if you think too much about things, you can end up never doing anything new. Don't you agree?
Or they might just be people who ecognised that there was still a person there who was worthy of their friendship. And people forgave people, he said. They did. They forgave.
But it's not always that easy to find somebody else, and you may not want to because the person you found earlier was the person you wanted to be with. And so what did you do? You got on with your life and tried not to think too much about it. And you could develop a particular trick - a trick that he had never discussed with anybody else but which worked. You took pleasure in the happiness of others. It was that simple. You may not have had what you want in life, but many did, and that was something to bear in mind. So, I'm glad for you.
Loving others, she thought, is the good thing we do in our lives.
Nobody would choose to be in love like that, to hold on so strongly to something that was no longer there. Yet we admire such instances of tenacity, finding nobility in loss and in the way in which some people bear it.
A friendship may be conceived in four hours; a short book finished and put away; a life remembered.
"Don't go through life giving up before you've even begun."
Oh yes, he said to himself. Oh yes, you do. You do. You think about somebody. He fills your world. He is all about you, a presence, and you think about him; you can't help it, because he's always there, in your thoughts. But you know, of course, that all the while you're thinking about him, he's not thinking about you. That's the hardest thing about it. That's what makes it so very, very hard to bear. So hard that sometimes you just sit there and let the misery wash over you; the misery, the emptiness. It's like a great white sea - one of those inland seas you see pictures of in the National Geographic; seas that are completely still, seas too salty to have waves or currents. Seas of tears.
The problem was that people pretended. It was not unlike the issue they were talking about earlier on - about the adequacy of effort and whether one could try to be brave. People tried to understand, and many did, but not everybody could make the imaginative leap that landed one in the position of another person, in their shoes, in their very garments, looking out on the world with their eyes, feeling what went on inside their hearts; being made to cry by the things that made them want to cry. That was easy in theoy, but hard in practice. They pretended to understand, but when it came down to it, many simply did not. They simply did not understand because they could not know - not really know - what it was like to be the other. That was because it was not them. That was why they could not think that. It had to be you.
"They don't feel it," said his father. "Lobsters don't feel things."
Adults lie, he thought. They lie about lobsters and a whole lot of other things.
The world is like that; memory has the effect of a telescope, making bigger the things we see through its lens, making them bigger than they really are.
Jenny: I think that if you think too much about things, you can end up never doing anything new. Don't you agree?
Or they might just be people who ecognised that there was still a person there who was worthy of their friendship. And people forgave people, he said. They did. They forgave.
But it's not always that easy to find somebody else, and you may not want to because the person you found earlier was the person you wanted to be with. And so what did you do? You got on with your life and tried not to think too much about it. And you could develop a particular trick - a trick that he had never discussed with anybody else but which worked. You took pleasure in the happiness of others. It was that simple. You may not have had what you want in life, but many did, and that was something to bear in mind. So, I'm glad for you.
Loving others, she thought, is the good thing we do in our lives.