Does Freedom Exist?
My sticky notes from Service, a new novel by John Tottenham:
At work:
There are seven or eight steps involved in a credit card transaction, and the entire procedure, from the moment of it being handed over to the printing of the receipt, takes approximately thirty seconds -- often longer, if as is so often the case, the machine is malfunctioning. I handle roughly two hundred of these transactions a week, which amounts to at least an hour and a half a week -- no less than seventy-five hours: three full days; nine full work days a year -- spent processing and handling these items of mercantile filth.
On liberty:
Does freedom exist? Yes, it can be bought: people who have money are free. They can afford to do what they want when they want -- and that is freedom, which, we are often told, is happiness.
and:
I slid into the tub as it was filling up and once submerged increased the flow of hot water until almost boiling. Then, and only then, did I know something resembling contentment.
It is my duty as a novelist to describe my time in the bathtub, basking in the consolation of art and liquor -- I should be summoning the sounds of cars rumbling by on the street outside, the strains of eerie violin sliding in, and the gurgling of water as it lapped against the overflow drain; I should be depicting the ant scurrying along the side of the bathtub, flirting with the spume-laced waterline, then darting back up to attempt egress through the deceptive crack at the bottom of the fake beige-veined marble tile; and I should be delineating the first exquisite sip of the Presbyterian, rich with the promise of relaxation, as it eased down my throat, and how I abstracted myself from these material surroundings and lost myself in the soothing world of Barbara Pym's prose -- not merely to state, dryly and diaristically, that I enjoyed spending time in the bath, but to reproduce the experience with telling details and evocative little flourishes.