Labor should not be about creating monuments on hills or statues in parks. Labor's monuments and statues are when a young person can find a job, when a person with disability can get access to the ordinary life that others take for granted.
Meanwhile the fact that the connection with the activity of memory in ordinary life is for the moment lost is of less importance than the reverse, namely, that this connection with the complications and fluctuations of life is necessarily still a too close one.
If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.
I love hearing other people's stories, and I freely admit I'm scavenging for material through their conversations, but really, at the same time, I'm living an ordinary life.
An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help rear your siblings, have the first of your own half-dozen or even dozen children soon after you're grown, and die before your youngest has left home.
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.
Dread, which is closely related to fear, steals the ability to enjoy ordinary life and makes people anxious about the future. It keeps them from looking forward to the next day, the next month, or the next decade.
There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.
Now most people do not want an ordinary life in which they do a job well, earn the respect of their collaborators and competitors, bring up a family and have friends. That's not enough any more, and I think that is absolutely tragic - and I'm not exaggerating - that people feel like a decent, ordinary, fun life is no longer enough.
'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.