5
" The shimmering tarmac of the deserted basketball court, a line of industrial-sized garbage cans, and beyond the electrified perimeter fence a vista that twangs a country and western chord of self-pity in me. For a brief moment, when I first arrived, I thought of putting a photo of Alex - Laughing Alpha Male at Roulette Wheel - next to my computer, alongside my family collection: Late Mother Squinting Into Sun on Pebbled Beach, Brother Pierre with Postpartum Wife and Male Twins, and Compos Mentis Father Fighting Daily Telegraph Crossword. But I stopped myself. Why give myself a daily reminder of what I have in every other way laid to rest? Besides, there would be curiosity from colleagues, and my responses to their questions would seem either morbid or tasteless or brutal depending on the pitch and role of my mood. Memories of my past existence, and the future that came with it, can start as benign, Vaselined nostalgia vignettes. But they’ll quickly ghost train into Malevolent noir shorts backlit by that great worst enemy of all victims of circumstance, hindsight. So for the sake of my own sanity, I apologize silently to Alex before burying him in the desk alongside my emergency bottle of Lauphroaig and a little homemade flower press given to me by a former patient who hanged himself with a clothesline.
The happy drawer. "
― Liz Jensen , The Rapture
9
" There is “colossal arrogance“, he maintains, in the assumption that humans will last forever. If one looks at the planet’s life across billions of years, rather than in terms of humankind’s meager history as a dominant species, we will see that our presence on earth has lasted the blink of an eye. “We are the agents of our own destruction - and when we are gone, extinguished by our own heedless quest for expansion, the planet will not mourn us. Indeed, it will have cause to rejoice. Today, the human species stands at the brink of a new mass extinction which will see, if not it’s disappearance, then its extreme marginalization./ for the first time in human history, the destruction - already apparent – is global. In times past, children and grandchildren were seen as a blessing, a sign of faith in the future of the gene pool. Now, it would seem that the kindest thing to do for our grandchildren is to refrain from generating them. “
Although more conservative and measured than the planetarian on the TV, Modak’s underlying message seems to be that pessimism is the new realism. I do not doubt his projections or his figures or his graphs. But his conclusions depress me. "
― Liz Jensen , The Rapture
11
" There are many things I would like to believe in, because they would accord life coherence. One of them is God. Another is the notion that on the brink of death one’s life dances before one’s eyes in kaleidoscopic fragments: dramas, traumas, transcendent highs, troughs of gloom, or the crystallize moments that encapsulate a certain mood on a certain day, like - for me - the smell of forsythia blossom at nursery school, or a turn of phrase - “ca va tourner au vinaigre “ - used by my mother, bitterly, to someone on the phone, or the pop of the dog fleas Pierre and I picked from our terrier and flicked onto the barbecue, or the appalling intimacy of my first kiss, or the body blow of my mother’s death, or the chaos of Pierre’s wedding, or the aching realization that dawned when my father said “Mesopotamia” instead of “kitchen”, or the night I shouted at Alex and he swerved, or the morning the doctors gave me the final assessment of my paraplegia and, for want of anything better to do, I glanced at the clock and noted that it was 11:23. "
― Liz Jensen , The Rapture
19
" A mixture of feelings- love, distaste, revulsion, pity- rose in my throat…There was an eternity to that moment, that see-sawing split- second when adoration clung and then lurched, spilling into chaos, rage, hate, anger: the desire to smash and embrace, love and destroy. Betrayal does that…Shows you how worthless love is, when its object is indifferent, ruthless, no more than a machine for surviving. "
― Liz Jensen , The Ninth Life of Louis Drax
20
" There’s a man with her. He’s blonde, balding, harassed-looking, and probably what they call time-poor. Older. He looks at me over the steering wheel and gives a helpless, frustrated gesture, as though I should be able to identify and sympathize with his plight. Then, as the woman starts to open the car door, he stops her with a swift movement. And suddenly they’re struggling, locked into a graceless, desperate tussle. I picture the dull, bestial unhappiness of a couple shackled to each other by their mortgage and their children’s shareed DNA. "
― Liz Jensen , The Rapture
