Jeanette Winterson

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Beatrix

‘After all,’ said my mother  philosophically, ‘oranges are not the only fruit.’

As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but harmless.

People do go back, but they don’t survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what’s left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

At that time I could not imagine what would become of me, and I didn’t care. It was not judgement day, but another morning.

I knew now where the blame lay. If there’s such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

I lay for a long time just watching the oranges. They were pretty, but not much help. I was going to need more than an icon to get me through this one. get

And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own. 

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

We continued our walk in silence. She thought I was satisfied, but I was wondering about her, and wondering where I would go to find out what I wanted to know. 

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

Sweet I was not. But I was a little girl, ergo, I was sweet, and here were sweets to prove it.

The woman was indeed perfect, there was no doubt about that, but she wasn't flawless. He, the prince, had been wrong. She was perfect because she was a perfect balance of qualities and strengths. She was symmet- rical in every respect. The search for perfection, she had told him, was in fact the search for balance, for harmony.

 The sermon was on perfection, and it was at this moment that I began to develop my first theological disagreement. 

Perfection, the man said, was a thing to aspire to. It was the condition of the Godhead, it was the condition of the man before the Fall. It could only be truly realized in the next world, but we had a sense of it, a maddening, impossible sense, which was both a blessing and a curse. 

‘Perfection,’ he announced, 'is flawlessness.’

The daily world was a world of Strange Notions, without form, and therefore void. I comforted myself as best I could by always rearranging their version of the facts. 

.. but she thought I should have made the Tower of Babel out of oregami, even though I told her it would be too difficult. "The Lord walked on the water,” was all she said when I tried to explain.

Perception, she said was a fraud; had not St Paul said we see in a glass darkly, had not Wordsworth said we see by glimpses? ‘This piece of fruit cake' - she waved it between bites - ‘this cake doesn't need me to eat it to make it edible. It exists without me.’

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

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