"...why can't we be ourselves, like we were yesterday..."

...He had to stop doing that. Of all the things he had to stop doing or start doing, that was right at the top of the list. But how do you stop doing something when you are completely unaware that you're doing it?
Charlotte was the one who pointed it out to him, when they were still together, but he'd probably been doing it for years before that.....'That thing,' she would say. 'You're doing that thing again.' At first it had been a joke between them. Then, like everything else in a marriage, it stopped being a joke and became a bone of contention, an issue, a source of resentment, one of the many things that rendered life on Planet Jeff - as she termed the uninhabitable wasteland of their marriage - intolerable. What she never understood, he claimed, was that life on Planet Jeff was intolerable for him too, more so, in fact, than for anyone else.
That, she claimed, was precisely her point.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Geoff Dyer






…I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose – but it was impossible to choose because I could live anywhere. There were no constraints on me and because of this it was impossible to choose. It’s easy to make choices when you have things hampering you – a job, kid’s schools – but when all you have to go on is your own desires, then life becomes considerably more difficult, not to say intolerable.


Out of Sheer Rage

Geoff Dyer




“..behind the counter was a young Indian girl. How old? Seventeen? Eighteen? Gorgeous, though, with a bright smile, unusual in her line of work. Maybe she was just starting out, taking time off from her A-levels or whatever they were calling it these days, filling in for her surly father, who, though he spoke little English, had so thoroughly adjusted to British life that he looked every bit as pissed off as whose ancestors had come over with the Normans….
Jeff gave her a pound coin. She handed him his change, met his eyes with her own, smiled….
It was so easy to make people (i.e. Jeff) feel a bit better about life (i.e. himself), so easy to make the world a slightly better place. The mystery was why so many people – and there were plenty of occasions when he could be counted among their number – opted to make it a worse one. He went away feeling happier than when he’d come in, charmed by her, even sort of aroused. Not aroused exactly, but curious. Curious about what kind of underwear she might have been wearing beneath her T-shirt and low-waisted jeans – exactly the kind of thinking presumably, that many in the Muslim community – the so–called Muslim community – used as justification for the full face veil. He had read, a few days earlier, that British Muslims were the most embittered, disgruntled and generally fed up of any in Europe. So why was there all this talk about the need for Muslims to integrate into British life? The fact that they were so pissed off was a sign of profound assimilation. What better proof could there be?”



Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Geoff Dyer