The rectangle of white fabric boinged him up, and up, and up. Through the netting he could see the snowboarders executing backflips. Safe from ambition, he just bounced up and up, grinning into the high space around him, with his feet landing again and again on the cross in the trampolineās centre. Perhaps, in all his striving towards satisfaction, heād overlooked the pursuit of joy.
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When I came up gasping, my father grabbed me and tossed me back in. When I remember that day, I remember soaring through the air and landing with a splat. I remember myself unattached from everything and yet made of everything. I was the air and the water. I was made of living fragments. I was past, present, and future at once. I felt, more than ever before, and perhaps ever since, deliciously free.
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.
When they were deciding whose place to go back to, he said they could go to his, but she should know he lived with his parents. She was amused again, said āvery unusualā and kissed him, lightly holding his face between cool, pale hands. At her flat, which was decorated like an adultās, with paintings and wooden furniture, he felt like a mortal whoād climbed Mount Olympus and with one outstretched, trembling hand, touched the breast of a god. It became one of his favourite memories, making him smile whenever he thought of it. But it never occurred to him to ask her out again. In later years, he couldnāt understand why. He suspected that this was a chance of happiness blithely overlooked.
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.
And there was wonder, too: he learned to see the wind by watching patches of ruffles on the waterās surface. To be on the sea at dawn, with the clouds blazing pink and gold, the sky all kinds of blue, the ocean reflecting everything above, as that ball of fire rose above the horizon, was like being inside a painting.