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that memory of myself staring at the bag of sugar and wondering if I really could quit never left me.
he describes and conflates his first sexual and smoking experience.
To expect a convict to have the strength to give up smoking is to expect a leopard to change his spots, become vegetarian and learn to knit, all on the same day.
I was a natural criminal because I lacked just that ability to resist temptation or to defer pleasure for one single second.
I never had such a guard on duty.
the bragging rights of being seen with prison-issue rolling papers.
the amiable young fogey who made puns in Latin
what are coughs, nausea, burns to the tongue and mouth, bitter tar in the spittle and the slow degradation of pulmonary capacity compared to that spinning, pulsing burst of love, that shuddering explosion of joy?
‘You should give up.’ ‘Why?’ ‘For one thing, you’ll live longer.’ ‘Oh, you don’t live longer. It just seems longer.’
‘How differently I might behave,’ Tom said, ‘if immortality were an option.’
But the appetites that drive us and our susceptibility, resistance, acceptance and denial of substances define and reveal us at least as much as abstract expressions of belief or bald recitations of action and achievement.
I seem to have been driven by greedy need and needy greed all my life.
‘I hate the idea of causes,’ he wrote, ‘and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’
Such a choice may scandalise the modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome.
‘Cambridge produces martyrs and Oxford burns them.’
He was even capable of wearing a bowtie without looking absurd, which is a very great human skill indeed.
Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars.
You cannot step into the same river twice, observed Heraclitus, for fresh water is always flowing over you.
Then one day, or over the course of time, I got greedy. Greedy to know things, greedy for understanding, greedy for information. I was always to some extent like that robot Number 5 in the movie Short Circuit who whizzes about shrieking, ‘Input! Input!’
that is what is so creepy about my particular brand of exhibitionism – I mask it in a cloak of affable modesty and touching false diffidence.
War, terrorism, poverty, injustice, as I recall … problems that have now all been solved but which at the time seemed most pressing.
Thighs appear to be safe around me.
I suppose it is, once more, all part of the feeling I have always had of being an outsider, always needing the proof of belonging that those who truly belong never need. Or something like that.
It is shameful and lowering to confess how I would mine dictionaries of literary and philosophical terms for words like eschatology, syncresis and syntagmatic.
the felid remains incapable of permuting his nevi)
(I only put the word ‘esoteric’ in front of ‘coteries’ because it is an anagram of it and that pleases me)
the instant camaraderie and deep affection one felt for everyone else involved,
I will not claim that the stage is my savannah, but I did feel something of the surge of relief and joy at finally having come home that the rhinos seemed to express as they nosed the air of Africa for the first time.
