Winter Stack

 

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist |  Cohn & Levithan

Nick stands up and offers his hand to me. I have no idea what he wants, but what the hell, I take his hand anyway, and he pulls me up on my feet then presses against me for a slow dance and it's like we're in a dream where he's Christopher Plummer and I'm Julie Andrews and we're dancing on the marble floor of an Austrian terrace garden. Somehow my head presses Nick's T-shirt and in this moment I am forgetting about time and Tal because maybe my life isn't over. Maybe it's only beginning. 

Cohn, Rachel & David Levithan. Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist. 
Electric Monkey: Great Britain, 2014.

The Sense of an Ending | Julian Barnes

Her own shelves held a lot of poetry, in volume and pamphlet form: Eliot, Auden, MacNiece. There were Left Book Club editions of Orwell and Koestler, some calf-bound nineteenth-century novels, a couple of childhood Arthur Rackhams, and her comfort book, I Capture the Castle. I didn’t for a moment doubt that she had read them all or that they were the right books to own. [24] 

At the same time, it made sense that Veronica didn’t give me a simple answer, didn’t do or say what I hoped or expected. In this she was at least consistent with my memory of her. Of course, at times, I’d been tempted to set her down as a woman a mystery, as opposed to the woman of clarity I married in Margaret. True, I hadn’t known where I was with her, couldn’t read her heart or her mind or her motivation. But an enigma is a puzzle you want to solve. I didn’t want to solve Veronica, certainly not at this late date. She been a bloody difficult young woman, 40 years ago, and – on the evidence of this two-word two-finger response – didn’t seem to have mellowed with age. [82] 

… There was a moment in my late twenties, when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life. 

But time . . . how time first grounds and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time . . . give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical. [93]

Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. Vintage: London, 2012.