16 November 2017

trams

‘She idly watched the people coming in and out. Their faces were preoccupied, a good many of them worried. They looked as though they were fussing about something, getting the right cake, getting home in time for lunch, remembering the shopping they had come to do. Very few of them looked as though they were enjoying themselves, as though there were any pleasure in  the mere fact of being alive, able to move and speak and buy cakes on a frosty November morning. Clare had a vision of people passing through life as through a railway station, squandering the moments they might have lived in because of some inner, compelling urgency that was making them always intent on some moment that was coming. We have got disorientated, she thought, pushed like a dislocated limb off this business of living! ‘(p.233)