Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns

by David Margolick

Nothing and no one really satisfies me except myself and ideas—music, poetry, intangibles. I am a sensation-seeker of a fairly high order, and when there are no more sensations I’ll probably die in a genteel but none the less jaded manner. By this token I can’t help hurting people, of whom I always tire before they tire of me. They delude themselves into thinking that in me they’ve found some key, some secret, some be-and-end-all. Sooner or later I find that they’re boring me or sucking me dry, and I have to make a clean break with them. It’s impossible for me, like most soldiers, to have a “buddy,” for my arc is too wide and too eccentric to admit of another’s presence. This summation of my perversities, reduced ad absurdum, makes me a great genius, a fool, a misanthrope, an ascetic. Probably I’m some of all; there’s a coldness and a cruelty and a logic in my reasoning that rather terrifies me … I’ve hardly ever failed to size up a character at once, on intuition; and later experience proves me to be right. I have moments of profound depression; my nerves are so sharp that I can reduce everything and everyone to a shamblesy zero. Then when I’m convinced I’m a cool ghoul, I have a moment of icy calm, like death; and the most exquisite fire and laughter glows in me, so that there seems to be between me and God a secret shared by very few.