Kudos

the defining motivation of the modern era, he said, whether consciously or not, is the pursuit of freedom from strictures or hardships of any kind.

‘Apparently they lower the oxygen levels in the cabin before take-off to make people sleepy,’ he said, ’so they shouldn’t really complain when it works. I have a friend who flies these things,’ he added. ‘He was the one who told me that.’

I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world – whatever its features – was catastrophic.

It did not seem like enough, she said, simply to pass the baton to the next runner, in the hope that she would win the race for me.

Our embarrassing secret,’ Eduardo said, rolling his eyes at the religious spectacle on the television. ‘You can possibly cope with thinking half the country is mad, but then tomorrow, with the football, it becomes clear the other half is mad too.’

In this country, she said, the only power women recognise is the power of the slave, and the only justice they understand is the slave’s fatalistic justice.

It had all the hallmarks of a thoughtless offering, something she’d just randomly picked up, but isn’t it the case, he said, that it’s the random thing that is so often the tool to lever yourself out of your rut?

I felt a great kinship with him

rested on the assumption that people lacked problems of their own, or at the very least had nothing better to do with their time