"And there is no better hiding place," he said, "then somewhere as close as possible to the truth, something all good liars know."

That idea—of one's own life as something that had already been dictated—was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camaflouged their capacity to destroy...But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had another, a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to become in effect, angry. I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

It was an interesting thought, that stability might be seen as the product of risk; it was perhaps when people tried to keep things the same that the process of decline began.

Sometimes it seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one's own destiny by what one doesn't notice or feel compassion for; that what you don't know and don't make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into the knowledge of.