‘You see, there’s no such thing as the rain before it falls. It has to fall or it isn’t rain.’ It was a silly point to be making to a little girl; I rather regretted starting on it. But Thea seemed to be having no difficulty grasping the concept; rather the reverse – for after a few moments she looked at me and shook her head pityingly, as if it was testing her patience to discuss such matters with a dimwit. ‘Of course there’s no such thing’, she said. ‘That’s why it’s my favourite. Something can still make you happy, can’t it, even if it isn’t real?’
…
The notion of your not existing, never having been born, seems so palpably wrong to me, so monstrous and unnatural… It’s not that your existence corrects all of those mistakes or undoes them. It doesn’t justify anything. What it means – have I said this before? I think I have, or something like it – or rather what it makes me understand, is this: that life only starts to make sense when you realize that sometimes – often, all the times – two completely contradictory ideas can be true.
Everything that led to you was wrong. Therefore you should not have been born.
But everything about you is right: you had to be born.
You were inevitable.
Jonathan Coe
