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we do what we can on our damp beds, but the mind must be exercised as well as the body.
Why is it that we wish to leave some mark behind? said Byron. Is it only vanity? No, I said, it is hope. Hope that one day there will be a human society that is just.
The gifts of our nature seem not to modify the manner of our behaviour.
I visited a manufactory in Manchester with my father. I saw that the wretched creatures enslaved to the machines were as repetitive in their movements as machines.
I could not break his heart. I deceive myself. I could not break his heart without telling him I was breaking his heart.
What seems so solid and certain is really part of the ceaseless pull-it-down-build-it-again pattern of history, where the turbulence of the past is recast as landmark, as icon, as tradition, as what we defend, what we uphold – until it’s time to call in the wrecking ball.
The rain increases. On the street, under hoods and umbrellas, people are walking quickly, going somewhere, leaving somewhere, earphones in, their faces lit by phone-light, atomised and alone. I am alone.
Time is a zip. Sometimes it snags.
Life is hard. Hard is OK. It’s hopeless and helpless that sucks.
want to live long enough to reach the future.
If we cannot keep this love, there is a place in me that has been changed by this love. And I will honour it. Think of it as a private place of worship, if you like. And sometimes, boarding a plane, or waking up, or walking down the street, or taking a shower (he pauses at the memory), I will recall that place and never regret the time I spent there.
We are what we fear. And so, the generous donations, the outpouring of compassion that we profess for the mad, what is it but an offering to our secret selves?
Yet this night feels like forever – not that it will last forever but that it is forever. This is where we belong. Our capsule lost in space. The rest is a dream we’re dreaming. He talks in his sleep.
I have to make up my mind about the future on a case-by-case basis. What is from God? And what is from the Devil?
We have returned to Italy because we cannot live in England. Small-minded, smug, self-righteous, unjust, a country that hates the stranger, whether that stranger be a foreigner or an atheist, or a poet, or a thinker, or a radical, or a woman. For women are strange to men.
The child is the property of the father. His lordship upholds the law when it suits him. So do they all. Revolutionaries and radicals until it touches on property – and that includes women and children. Till it comes to whatever hurts them personally. Whatever checks their stride. God! Their infidelities, their indifference, their insensitivity. Great God! The insensitivity of poets.
I can change my body but I can’t change my body’s reading of my body. The paradox is that I felt in the wrong body but for my body it was the right body. What I have done calms my mind and agitates my chemistry. Few people know what it’s like to live in this way.
Let me tell you this: love has many faces – but none is bruised. Love has many lives – but none is beaten to death on the stairwell. This gentle thing of circuits, silicon and wires will suit me very well.
