Recently she’d had to admit to herself the lessons contained there might still be valid – it might be mad to discard that book before she learned how to cope with the countdown of days. She hadn’t kept many of the other works they’d debated so hotly though, because in the end, like this one, they’d left her feeling empty. Back then, in their student days, Xavier had taken existentialism to heart, even as she tried to introduce him to her world – Lem, Mrozek, Schulz. And Szymborska – the countless beauty of poetry that did touch some essence. But like most of his classmates, Xavier was unmoveable, romanticising the foreign while clinging fiercely to French superiority.
Of course like many committed existentialists Xavier later became an uber-materialist, a consummate consumer, a trader, as if the idea of nothingness had swung the door wide open to pure excess. Now nothingness prevailed, even as modernity claimed to have largely discarded Sartrean ideas. In fact, it seemed more like nothingness had been bought into fully: God’s dead, life’s pointless, might as well shop. Hedonism, just a form of pointless existence, but non-believers, atheists and religious alike nowadays could be seen carrying on building their little lives as if their petty concerns mattered. Well, she’d never believed in non-belief anyway. Everyone believed something. Like Tato with his physics and religion, God might be gone only because you couldn’t find him, hadn’t looked hard enough. Lately Tato was going on and on about singularity, that infinite but tiny density inside black holes. She didn’t understand whether he thought symmetry was a workable proposition or whether he hoped God might be found there, where nothing made sense and infinities stacked up. He’d never subscribed to the theory of intelligent design, said the argument for God didn’t lie in the observable universe anyway. Even multiverses didn’t negate God because by nature God is something nothing can negate. She mostly wasn’t sure, didn’t feel too much in this regard. But nothingness certainly wasn’t workable, had to be fought off. Because even if life seemed pointless, it still functioned in rational,
repetitive ways. Even science with its great divide between order and chaos often revealed randomness as a false cover. That underneath it all, you could subscribe to beauty and simplicity, in one form or another. That the quest itself was important: the search for order and truth if not compulsion, then duty, ritual.
Continuing to stack more briskly, she returns books to categories proven to work. Like the start of the Plan, which was no different – a way of enshrining reason and practicality. No different to how most people managed their lives. When decision time came the Holdens dealt mostly with logistics, repackaging their residual emotions like weights on a scale. They’d considered how moving to Warsaw would mean upheaval after only just settling into Corner House. How there’d be no guarantee of return to this good English life, so carefully crafted. How they’d lose hard won places at Mountmore, a worry so paramount when the school’s excellent reputation hadn’t yet been tarnished by closer examination. How they’d lose friends like David and Jenny, their whole community – until she herself conceded. Because actually who would look in on frail Miss Miriam? Besides, Harry was right. He’d be on the road – Vienna, Paris, Berlin – not Warsaw most of the time, and a year wasn’t long; afterwards things would be different. So many reasons she’d left Poland in the first place, if they moved there how would she fit in after so many years abroad? She no longer resembled women back home any more than these nubile twenty-year-olds working in local cafes, young girls recently arrived in Britain from a distant part of the EU, brimming with excitement and the prospect of foreign adventure. No, Slavic features, high cheekbones, a penchant for red hair, might be all she shared with them now. All that was left of that young Eva displaced long ago. Now she and the children were becoming English. You couldn’t disrupt that, not for a matter of a few months.
Job done. She shoves in the last book, stands back to survey the old order of things. Well, slightly revised. Because of course in private Tato had asked whether her marriage was strong enough to withstand
© Lesia Daria
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