Panic On The Streets Of Birmingham

Does narrative serve any purpose? I wonder about that. I wonder if all experience can really be distilled to a few extraordinary moments, perhaps six or seven of them vouchsafed to us in a lifetime, and any attempt to trace connection between them is futile. And I wonder if there are some moments in life not only 'worth purchasing with words', but so replete with emotion that they become stretched, timeless, like the moment when Inger and Emil sat on that bench in the rose garden and smiled at the camera, or when Inger's mother raised the Venetian blind to the very top of her high sitting-room window, or when Malcom openedup his jeweller's box and asked my sister to marry him. If he ever did.

*

....my clearest memory is of the light we saw there, that painter's sky, greyblue like Marie's eyes and like her grandsons' eyes, the colour of a pain that won't go away...

(Ben Trotter)
Jonathan Coe - Rotter's Club