Cave & Julia

Kindle highlights:

He waited for her early next morning at the tourist beach, a deserted, artificial curve of white sand. The day was already sullen and humid, with hidden light penetrating the cloud and heat resonating from the limestone buttresses above the town. Faint residual smells clung in the corners of the sea wall: the previous day's fish, salt, perfume, fried food. For a moment it seemed to Cave like a language, but when he listened it had nothing to say.

‘This was a culture of engines,' Julia Vicente said. ‘Some architectural, some sacrificial, some both.'

Cave sat on the sand, and around him everything was suspended in light; everything like a film, wrapped in cameraman sublime, documentary sublime. Light, silhouettes, warmth like a perfect saturated colour, all at once. Distant objects seemed too large. In the end, he told himself for the hundredth time in his life, you are the only description of what there is. All that counts is to be there.

The shutters banged in the wind under an eggshell sky.

Back in London he barely thought of her, yet soon found himself outbound again on a 787 Dreamliner from Heathrow. ‘Before you ask,' he told her when she found him on her doorstep five hours later, ‘I have no memory of buying the ticket, let alone making the decision.' He'd brought the clothes he stood up in, he said; a credit card and his passport. She laughed. ‘I've got someone here,' she said. ‘But I can get rid of him tomorrow.' ‘I don't mind,' Cave said. She shut the door. ‘Yes you do,' she called from inside. After that, he made the crossing two or three times a year; visits between which the rest of his life suspended itself like a bridge.

a condition of anxiety which founded not just his memories of Autotelia but of himself.