Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

There are times when fatigue is the great aphrodisiac, annihilating all other thoughts, granting sensuous slow motion to heavy limbs, urging generosity, acceptance, infinite abandonment. We tumbled out of our respective days like creatures shaken from a net. (56)

People often remark on how quickly the extraordinary becomes commonplace. I think that every time I'm on a motorway at night, or on a plane as it rises through cloud cover into sunlight. We are highly adaptive creatures. The predictable becomes, by definition, background, leaving the attention uncluttered, the better to deal with the random or unexpected. (151)

I loved the telescopic nature of this next bit. McEwan takes us from pondering visible critters in the soil, down to the perspective of the most microscopic of mycelia and then suddenly we are sucked back up from such revery and thrown straight into the dangers of this world -- shooting down the road and into the immediate future. It's the perfect spell, this suspension of suspense, when our minds are sidetracked momentarily from what has been the obsessive driving force of this book. It's genius:

In the rich black crumbly mulch I saw two black ants, a springtail, and a dark red wormlike creature with a score of pale brown legs. These were the rumbling giants of this lower world, for not far below the threshold of visibility was the seething world of the roundworms, the scavengers and the predators who fed on them; and even these were giants relative to the inhabitants of the microscopic realm, the parasitic fungi and the bacteria - perhaps ten million of them in this handful of soil. The blind compulsion of these organisms to consume and excrete made possible the richness of the soil and therefore the plants, the trees, and the creatures that lived among them, whose number had once included ourselves. What I thought might calm me was the reminder that for all our concerns, we were still part of this natural dependency, for the animals that we ate grazed the plants which, like our vegetables and fruits, were nourished by the soil formed by these organisms. But even as I squatted to enrich the forest floor, I could not believe in the primary significance of these grand cycles. Just beyond the oxygen-exhaling trees stood my poison-exuding vehicle, inside which was my gun, and thirty-five miles down teeming roads was the enormous city on whose northern side was my apartment, where a madman was waiting, a de Clerambault, my de Clerambault, and my threatened loved one. (224-225)

(1997. New York: Anchor Books, 1999)