It was not the time for Roland to start playing up. But James was realising that this was the nature of adult life. There were no breakthroughs into clear open space. Every time you were just getting into your stride, something tripped you. It was like trying to construct a functioning car out of pasta shapes: every time you, with supreme care and delicacy, got this improbable object moving forward, something snapped again.
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The following out-of-work period was difficult but gave him [DeVore] some real exercise in a new kind of resonance:
The unsuccessful job-hunting became very frustrating, and I became very depressed. So much so that I made myself susceptible to a virus that resulted in spinal meningitis. And I was laid down flat in bed for three months with no income coming in. Nothing coming in at all and a wife who was pregnant, mortgage payments that were overdue, and every time I started to stand up my head just throbbed and I couldnât do anything. All I could do was read. And so I had my wife go to the library.
I said, âGet me every book you can on every great person, every person who has been successful.â In these three months I devoured about twenty-five autobiographies and biographies of great people. And every time I read these biographies or autobiographies I identified with these people. These people became models.
Tarrant paints a vivid picture of how challenging this can be. In one of my favorite
passages, he puts it like this:
If you are used to living in a small room and suddenly discover a wide meadow, you might feel unsafe. Everyone thinks that they want happiness, but they might not. They might rather keep their stories about who they are and about what is impossible. Happiness is not an add-on to what you already are; it requires you to become a different person from the one who set off seeking it.
most bemusing were those who seemed to intentionally trip themselves up â because it showed that they were a free spirit, or glamorously troubled, or too popular for secondary reading. They seemed to think it was interesting to be bad at things. They didnât seem to understand that being bad at things was the default. Almost everyone since the dawn of time had been bad at almost everything. It was simply the world operating as expected. It was like if you let go of an object and all it did was drop inertly to the ground. Far more remarkable if, when you let go, it began to fly.
science. Really, this was a lesson in humility. You couldnât blame the outside world for not conforming to your ideas. It wasnât the world that was wrong, it was you. Either you could be humiliated and angry and hurt, or you could let that go and start building a better model. He began to search where he always had: within himself. In some ways, it wasnât complicated: if tidal energy wasnât going to beat gas and coal on price, and you still needed tidal to win, you had to assume that gas and coal were finished.
James was suddenly, utterly, exhausted. He should have foreseen this. Everyone loved Roland. James loved him. For the first time since their trip to Lochnagar in the purple Lamborghini, he felt himself to be alone in the world. Nothing had changed since he was a teenager. He hadnât, after all, left himself behind. Slowly, he reasoned his way through the matter at hand. Perhaps if heâd been less reasonable, heâd still have her. âWell, if Alice and me didnât match up, that doesnât mean you and her shouldnât try. Itâs a question of compatibility not⌠possession. Itâs not like Iâve got any claims on her.â