Free Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

traveller’). He reassured me that one does survive the grief; moreover, one emerges a ‘stronger’, and in some ways a ‘better’, person. This struck me as outrageous and self-praising (as well as too quickly decided). How could I possibly be a better person without her than with her? Later, I thought: but he is just echoing Nietzsche’s line about what doesn’t kill us making us stronger. And as it happens, I have long considered this epigram particularly specious. There are many things that fail to kill us but weaken us for ever. Ask anyone who deals with victims of torture. Ask rape counsellors and those who handle domestic violence. Look around at those emotionally damaged by mere ordinary life.
     
    Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names? It also reconfigures space. You have entered a new geography, mapped by a new cartography. You seem to be taking your bearings from one of those seventeenth-century maps which feature the Desert of Loss, the (windless) Lake of Indifference, the (dried-up) River of Desolation, the Bog of Self-Pity, and the (subterranean) Caverns of Memory.
    In this new-found-land there is no hierarchy, except that of feeling, of pain. Who has fallen from the greater height, who has spilt more organs on the ground? Except that it rarely seems as straightforward – straightforwardly sad – as this. There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd, like one of those dressed mannequins, surrounded by skulls, that Nadar photographed in the Catacombs. Or like that boa constrictor which took to swallowing sofa cushions and had to be shot dead.
    I look at my key ring (which used to be hers): it holds only two keys, one to the front door of the house and one to the back gate of the cemetery. This is my life, I think. I notice strange continuities: I used to rub oil into her back because her skin dried easily; now I rub oil into the drying oak of her grave-marker. But what seems to have disappeared is a feel for the pattern of things. At the start of his life, Fred Burnaby jumped twenty feet off a piece of gymnastic equipment and broke his leg. Towards the end of her life, while playing La Tosca, Sarah Bernhardt jumped off the battlements of Castel Sant’Angelo only to discover that the stagehands had forgotten to pile up mattresses to cushion her fall; she broke her leg. For that matter, Nadar broke his leg when The Giant crashed; and my wife broke her leg on our front steps. This might as well be a pattern, you think, whereas before it would have seemed a strange but trivial coincidence, just a question of height, of how far each of us falls in life. Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any pattern exists. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern. Writers believe in the patterns their words make, which they hope and trust add up to ideas, to stories, to truths. This is always their salvation, whether griefless or griefstruck.
     
    First Nietzsche, then Nadar. God is dead, and no longer there to see us. So we must see us. And Nadar gave us the distance, the height, to do so. He gave us God’s distance, the God’s-eye view. And where it ended (for the moment) was with Earthrise and those photographs taken from lunar orbit, in which our planet looks more or less like any other planet (except to an astronomer): silent, revolving, beautiful, dead, irrelevant. Which may have been how God saw us, and why He absented himself. Of course I don’t believe in the Absenting God, but such a story makes a nice pattern.
     
    When we killed – or exiled – God, we also killed ourselves. Did we notice that sufficiently at the time? No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this