Beautiful World, Where Are You

Eileen’s letter to Alice revisits the conversation about the Late Bronze Age collapse and theorizes about the definition of civilization. She wonders, “How many inhabitants of this ‘civilisation’ actually lived in the palaces? How many wore the jewellery, drank from the bronze cups, ate the pomegranates?” (160). She considers that even after civilization has apparently ended, ordinary people still lived more or less in the way they did before. This thought gives her some relief from the misery of human existence, that the meaning of life is “just to live and be with other people” (161). Eileen pivots to talking about the “life book” she started years ago to capture aesthetic moments in writing.

First it was easy to find aesthetic beauty in everyday life, but then she started missing days and failing to see new beautiful moments. She concludes that her past recognition of a beautiful world was due to the possibilities of youth: “I felt anything was possible, that there were no doors shut behind me, and that out there somewhere, as yet unknown, there were people who would love and admire me and want to make me happy” (163). She describes one moment since, where she briefly felt that blissful beautiful moment before it slipped away: she was returning home late from a book launch and felt the beauty “like a light radiating softly from behind the visible world, illuminating everything” (164).