Beautiful World, Where Are You

I mean literally, sell it for money, until I have a lot of money and no talent left. And then that’s it, I’m finished, and the next flashy twenty-five-year-old with an impending psychological collapse comes along.

Can it be that during the service I actually came to admire the sincerity of Simon’s faith? But how is it possible for me to admire someone for believing something I don’t believe, and don’t want to believe, and which I think is manifestly incorrect and absurd? If Simon started to worship a turtle as the son of God, for example, would I admire his sincerity? From a strictly rationalist perspective, it makes as much sense to worship a turtle as it does to worship a first-century Judaean preacher. Considering that God doesn’t exist, the whole thing is random anyway, and it may as well be Jesus, or a plastic bucket, or William Shakespeare, it doesn’t matter.

And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive – because we are so stupid about each other

on some level. Right? It has to

That’s what kills me. I spent half my twenties with this person, and in the end he just got sick of me. I mean, that’s what happened. I bored him. I feel like that says something about me

To live with someone I really love and respect, who really loves and respects me — what a difference it has made to my life.

I consider how much he loves me. I do try to remind myself that men can be foolish about women.

And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy.

We have to try either way to build a world they can live in

At first I thought: a perfect example of our shallow self-congratulatory ‘book culture’, in which non-readers are shunned as morally inferior, and the more books you read, the better you are than everyone else. But then I thought: no, what we really have here is an example of a presumably normal and sane person whose thinking has been deranged by the concept of celebrity. An example of someone who genuinely believes that because she has seen my photograph and read my novels, she knows me personally — and in fact knows better than I do what is best for my life