[1] Typo of the week: a member of the public (i.e. one of the unwashed masses) wrote to the PM asking him to "tamper justice with kindness".
My other favourite is something I found in a government report, explaining that the Government must "exercise a judgemental call".
Incidentally, my department just bought everyone a grammar book (Plain Words by Ernest Gowers) before we degenerated from incoherence into a complete and entire illiteracy.
[2] You know the Robert Herrick poem that starts "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may"? It's called "To a Virgin, to make the most of time" or some suchlike. They do this thing in my office where everytime you start your computer, a powerpoint slide pops up with reminders, exhortations, warnings, grammar tips (forsooth), and cheery inspirational messages. A couple of days ago it was the Herrick poem.
Monday, February 28, 2005
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Notes
In no particular order:
[1] Watch "Sideways" while it only shows a possible doom and not a current predicament. There's this fantastic moment where the two friends are sitting on the beach talking.
[2] Addy, Jianyi, a couple of their friends and I tried to watch "La Jetee" at the Arts House. They screened the first 15 minutes or so to a muted undertone of "Total Eclipse of the Heart", stopped the film to try and turn off the house music, tore the film (on loan from the Alliance Francaise, thus worsening relations between the two countries), attempted to repair it with sticky tape, started the film from the beginning, gave up when the tape jammed in the projector, and apologised profusely.
[3] Wine Network at Dempsey Road with Julian, Addy and Jianyi, which was rather nice, even if at the back of beyond. What we need to do is go to the Mitre (you remember the creepy derelict hotel bar place?) to balance out the yuppies and the expats.
[4] Carried a bamboo (courtesy of Steve) back on the train and was stared at by a number of kids. Passed by a couple of joggers on the way back to my house, one of whom said to the other, "Quite expensive to get bamboo poles nowadays, must go chop it down yourself..."
[5] Shin Gee's getting married. Have I said this already? I'm told this is the first wave of marriages. Brace yourself.
[6] Lee sends this, and I can only offer it to all of you:
[1] Watch "Sideways" while it only shows a possible doom and not a current predicament. There's this fantastic moment where the two friends are sitting on the beach talking.
Miles (grade-school English teacher and unpublished - and apparently unpublishable - writer): Half my life is over and I have nothing to show for it. Nothing. I'm a thumbprint on the window of a skyscraper. I'm a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea with a million tons of raw sewage.At which point someone sitting behind us in the audience says, Who's Bukowski?
Jack (actor who did a successful day-time soap once and now does ads): See? Right there. Just what you just said. That is beautiful. 'A smudge of excrement... surging out to sea.'
Miles: Yeah.
Jack: I could never write that.
Miles: Neither could I, actually. I think it's Bukowski.
[2] Addy, Jianyi, a couple of their friends and I tried to watch "La Jetee" at the Arts House. They screened the first 15 minutes or so to a muted undertone of "Total Eclipse of the Heart", stopped the film to try and turn off the house music, tore the film (on loan from the Alliance Francaise, thus worsening relations between the two countries), attempted to repair it with sticky tape, started the film from the beginning, gave up when the tape jammed in the projector, and apologised profusely.
[3] Wine Network at Dempsey Road with Julian, Addy and Jianyi, which was rather nice, even if at the back of beyond. What we need to do is go to the Mitre (you remember the creepy derelict hotel bar place?) to balance out the yuppies and the expats.
[4] Carried a bamboo (courtesy of Steve) back on the train and was stared at by a number of kids. Passed by a couple of joggers on the way back to my house, one of whom said to the other, "Quite expensive to get bamboo poles nowadays, must go chop it down yourself..."
[5] Shin Gee's getting married. Have I said this already? I'm told this is the first wave of marriages. Brace yourself.
[6] Lee sends this, and I can only offer it to all of you:
i read a great story about a factory worker who used to tape a poem in front of his machine where he worked. his job was repetitive and mindless and so he would just read the poem in front of him all day long and attempt to memorize it. eventually, his boss called him in and said, "look, you're a good kid and this is probably the first time you've been fired, but don't take it too hard. you're smart and you'll find a good job. but i couldn't have you here. everyone else here looks angry while they work and you just walk around with that goofy smile on your face. it creeps us out. good luck."
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Interviews/essays this time
Reading about Rexroth, I want to learn Japanese. Oh yes and Chinese too.
Eliot Weinberger writes about Rexroth at his death. And on Rexroth, Chinese poetry and the American imagination. (Maybe I'll just read Weinberger instead.) Somewhere on the site are Rexroth's readings of his poems accompanied by a jazz band.
There's not enough time, what with faffing and reading Pratchett, not to mention the office. I tried the whole gainful employment thing and found myself, to no-one's surprise, amazingly incompetent at it; can I stop now?
Eliot Weinberger writes about Rexroth at his death. And on Rexroth, Chinese poetry and the American imagination. (Maybe I'll just read Weinberger instead.) Somewhere on the site are Rexroth's readings of his poems accompanied by a jazz band.
There's not enough time, what with faffing and reading Pratchett, not to mention the office. I tried the whole gainful employment thing and found myself, to no-one's surprise, amazingly incompetent at it; can I stop now?
More Rexroth
Found Rexroth poems on the net. This one's for you, if you read this, if you like.
When We With Sappho
“. . . about the cool water
the wind sounds through sprays
of apple, and from the quivering leaves
slumber pours down . . .”
We lie here in the bee filled, ruinous
Orchard of a decayed New England farm,
Summer in our hair, and the smell
Of summer in our twined bodies,
Summer in our mouths, and summer
In the luminous, fragmentary words
Of this dead Greek woman.
Stop reading. Lean back. Give me your mouth.
Your grace is as beautiful as sleep.
You move against me like a wave
That moves in sleep.
Your body spreads across my brain
Like a bird filled summer;
Not like a body, not like a separate thing,
But like a nimbus that hovers
Over every other thing in all the world.
Lean back. You are beautiful,
As beautiful as the folding
Of your hands in sleep.
We have grown old in the afternoon.
Here in our orchard we are as old
As she is now, wherever dissipate
In that distant sea her gleaming dust
Flashes in the wave crest
Or stains the murex shell.
All about us the old farm subsides
Into the honey bearing chaos of high summer.
In those far islands the temples
Have fallen away, and the marble
Is the color of wild honey.
There is nothing left of the gardens
That were once about them, of the fat
Turf marked with cloven hooves.
Only the sea grass struggles
Over the crumbled stone,
Over the splintered steps,
Only the blue and yellow
Of the sea, and the cliffs
Red in the distance across the bay.
Lean back.
Her memory has passed to our lips now.
Our kisses fall through summer’s chaos
In our own breasts and thighs.
Gold colossal domes of cumulus cloud
Lift over the undulant, sibilant forest.
The air presses against the earth.
Thunder breaks over the mountains.
Far off, over the Adirondacks,
Lightning quivers, almost invisible
In the bright sky, violet against
The grey, deep shadows of the bellied clouds.
The sweet virile hair of thunder storms
Brushes over the swelling horizon.
Take off your shoes and stockings.
I will kiss your sweet legs and feet
As they lie half buried in the tangle
Of rank scented midsummer flowers.
Take off your clothes. I will press
Your summer honeyed flesh into the hot
Soil, into the crushed, acrid herbage
Of midsummer. Let your body sink
Like honey through the hot
Granular fingers of summer.
Rest. Wait. We have enough for a while.
Kiss me with your mouth
Wet and ragged, your mouth that tastes
Of my own flesh. Read to me again
The twisting music of that language
That is of all others, itself a work of art.
Read again those isolate, poignant words
Saved by ancient grammarians
To illustrate the conjugations
And declensions of the more ancient dead.
Lean back in the curve of my body,
Press your bruised shoulders against
The damp hair of my body.
Kiss me again. Think, sweet linguist,
In this world the ablative is impossible.
No other one will help us here.
We must help ourselves to each other.
The wind walks slowly away from the storm;
Veers on the wooded crests; sounds
In the valleys. Here we are isolate,
One with the other; and beyond
This orchard lies isolation,
The isolation of all the world.
Never let anything intrude
On the isolation of this day,
These words, isolate on dead tongues,
This orchard, hidden from fact and history,
These shadows, blended in the summer light,
Together isolate beyond the world’s reciprocity.
Do not talk any more. Do not speak.
Do not break silence until
We are weary of each other.
Let our fingers run like steel
Carving the contours of our bodies’ gold.
Do not speak. My face sinks
In the clotted summer of your hair.
The sound of the bees stops.
Stillness falls like a cloud.
Be still. Let your body fall away
Into the awe filled silence
Of the fulfilled summer —
Back, back, infinitely away —
Our lips weak, faint with stillness.
See. The sun has fallen away.
Now there are amber
Long lights on the shattered
Boles of the ancient apple trees.
Our bodies move to each other
As bodies move in sleep;
At once filled and exhausted,
As the summer moves to autumn,
As we, with Sappho, move towards death.
My eyelids sink toward sleep in the hot
Autumn of your uncoiled hair.
Your body moves in my arms
On the verge of sleep;
And it is as though I held
In my arms the bird filled
Evening sky of summer.
- Kenneth Rexroth
When We With Sappho
“. . . about the cool water
the wind sounds through sprays
of apple, and from the quivering leaves
slumber pours down . . .”
We lie here in the bee filled, ruinous
Orchard of a decayed New England farm,
Summer in our hair, and the smell
Of summer in our twined bodies,
Summer in our mouths, and summer
In the luminous, fragmentary words
Of this dead Greek woman.
Stop reading. Lean back. Give me your mouth.
Your grace is as beautiful as sleep.
You move against me like a wave
That moves in sleep.
Your body spreads across my brain
Like a bird filled summer;
Not like a body, not like a separate thing,
But like a nimbus that hovers
Over every other thing in all the world.
Lean back. You are beautiful,
As beautiful as the folding
Of your hands in sleep.
We have grown old in the afternoon.
Here in our orchard we are as old
As she is now, wherever dissipate
In that distant sea her gleaming dust
Flashes in the wave crest
Or stains the murex shell.
All about us the old farm subsides
Into the honey bearing chaos of high summer.
In those far islands the temples
Have fallen away, and the marble
Is the color of wild honey.
There is nothing left of the gardens
That were once about them, of the fat
Turf marked with cloven hooves.
Only the sea grass struggles
Over the crumbled stone,
Over the splintered steps,
Only the blue and yellow
Of the sea, and the cliffs
Red in the distance across the bay.
Lean back.
Her memory has passed to our lips now.
Our kisses fall through summer’s chaos
In our own breasts and thighs.
Gold colossal domes of cumulus cloud
Lift over the undulant, sibilant forest.
The air presses against the earth.
Thunder breaks over the mountains.
Far off, over the Adirondacks,
Lightning quivers, almost invisible
In the bright sky, violet against
The grey, deep shadows of the bellied clouds.
The sweet virile hair of thunder storms
Brushes over the swelling horizon.
Take off your shoes and stockings.
I will kiss your sweet legs and feet
As they lie half buried in the tangle
Of rank scented midsummer flowers.
Take off your clothes. I will press
Your summer honeyed flesh into the hot
Soil, into the crushed, acrid herbage
Of midsummer. Let your body sink
Like honey through the hot
Granular fingers of summer.
Rest. Wait. We have enough for a while.
Kiss me with your mouth
Wet and ragged, your mouth that tastes
Of my own flesh. Read to me again
The twisting music of that language
That is of all others, itself a work of art.
Read again those isolate, poignant words
Saved by ancient grammarians
To illustrate the conjugations
And declensions of the more ancient dead.
Lean back in the curve of my body,
Press your bruised shoulders against
The damp hair of my body.
Kiss me again. Think, sweet linguist,
In this world the ablative is impossible.
No other one will help us here.
We must help ourselves to each other.
The wind walks slowly away from the storm;
Veers on the wooded crests; sounds
In the valleys. Here we are isolate,
One with the other; and beyond
This orchard lies isolation,
The isolation of all the world.
Never let anything intrude
On the isolation of this day,
These words, isolate on dead tongues,
This orchard, hidden from fact and history,
These shadows, blended in the summer light,
Together isolate beyond the world’s reciprocity.
Do not talk any more. Do not speak.
Do not break silence until
We are weary of each other.
Let our fingers run like steel
Carving the contours of our bodies’ gold.
Do not speak. My face sinks
In the clotted summer of your hair.
The sound of the bees stops.
Stillness falls like a cloud.
Be still. Let your body fall away
Into the awe filled silence
Of the fulfilled summer —
Back, back, infinitely away —
Our lips weak, faint with stillness.
See. The sun has fallen away.
Now there are amber
Long lights on the shattered
Boles of the ancient apple trees.
Our bodies move to each other
As bodies move in sleep;
At once filled and exhausted,
As the summer moves to autumn,
As we, with Sappho, move towards death.
My eyelids sink toward sleep in the hot
Autumn of your uncoiled hair.
Your body moves in my arms
On the verge of sleep;
And it is as though I held
In my arms the bird filled
Evening sky of summer.
- Kenneth Rexroth
The Advantages of Learning
I am a man with no ambitions
And few friends, wholly incapable
Of making a living, growing no
Younger, fugitive from some just doom.
Lonely, ill-clothed, what does it matter?
At midnight I make myself a jug
Of hot white wine and cardamon seeds.
In a torn grey robe and old beret,
I sit in the cold writing poems,
Drawing nudes on the crooked margins,
Copulating with sixteen year old
Nymphomaniacs of my imagination.
- Kenneth Rexroth
And few friends, wholly incapable
Of making a living, growing no
Younger, fugitive from some just doom.
Lonely, ill-clothed, what does it matter?
At midnight I make myself a jug
Of hot white wine and cardamon seeds.
In a torn grey robe and old beret,
I sit in the cold writing poems,
Drawing nudes on the crooked margins,
Copulating with sixteen year old
Nymphomaniacs of my imagination.
- Kenneth Rexroth
New York, New York
"...the mark of a city worth living in is that there are never enough places to park".
Making books
Me: I've been reading and re-reading Diana Athill's Instead of a Letter and now I'm inspired. I want to work in publishing.
WN: Why?
Me: To be part of making a book!
WN: You can be a stapler.
WN: Why?
Me: To be part of making a book!
WN: You can be a stapler.
[why this need for explanation?]
Am I really immortal, does the sun care, when you leave will you give me back the words? Don't evade, don't pretend you won't leave after all: you leave in the story and the story is ruthless.- Margaret Atwood, from the Circe/Mud poems.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Howl's Moving Castle
I haven't read the book, but the movie's not worthy of Diana Wynne Jones (from what I have read), or Hayao Miyazaki (so I'm told). It's cute in parts but Miyazaki gives up on the plot halfway and brings the movie to a soppy ending in tears and laughter and sunshine and happily ever after.
Measuring worth
Focus on the Family is coordinating a "Worth Waiting For" project - getting kids (alright; young people) to pledge abstinence from pre-marital sex by wearing red-and-white bands. The red stands for true love and the white for purity.
Focus on the Family: "it's a message that young people love to have and love to embrace but it's just giving them the opportunity to embrace that hey, they can be empowered to save sex until after marriage and there are individuals worth waiting for."
[My modesty, the jewel in my dower? This campaign seems misconceived - isn't the important thing is to treat others with consideration and generosity and respect (and, yes, love, if you can manage it), rather than whether or not you go to bed with them? To simply say, stay away from sex! is too easy. Besides, as Diane Athill says - the tenderness between bodies may be restricted, but it is real, and if sex teaches you to think about a person other than yourself, then that's no bad thing.]
Focus on the Family: "it's a message that young people love to have and love to embrace but it's just giving them the opportunity to embrace that hey, they can be empowered to save sex until after marriage and there are individuals worth waiting for."
[My modesty, the jewel in my dower? This campaign seems misconceived - isn't the important thing is to treat others with consideration and generosity and respect (and, yes, love, if you can manage it), rather than whether or not you go to bed with them? To simply say, stay away from sex! is too easy. Besides, as Diane Athill says - the tenderness between bodies may be restricted, but it is real, and if sex teaches you to think about a person other than yourself, then that's no bad thing.]
Breathing space (2)
I don't think one should repeat quotations. Nonetheless - from Anne Carson's Plainwater -
In the city of Burgos lies El Cid himself - beside Ximena he rests in an eternal conversation. Beneath the transept of Burgos Cathedral they have lain since 1921, and before that, in a burial place in the city from the year 1835, and previously, seven hundred years in the monastery of San Pedro outside the city walls. By now, she must know every word he is going to say. Yet she kisses his mouth and the eyes of his face, she kisses his hands, his truth, his marrow. What is the conversation of lovers? Compared with ordinary talk, it is as bread to stones. ...
There is no question I covet that conversation. There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of a bridge, I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth, would you cross that bridge if you came to it? And where, if you made the grave choice to give up bread, would it take you? You see what I fear.
Breathing space (1)
Minzhi came last weekend - no, weekend before last - and we had far too much food for dinner (coq au vin using Great Wall wine and potatoes and seafood) and Julian came to find everyone sprawled in the TV den eating Awfully Chocolate cake and watching Ab Fab. On Sunday we bewildered Julian's friends with smatterings of Chinese food and culture (rather more food than culture) and the Botanic Gardens. The Evolution Garden at the Botanic Gardens has signs like Monty Python chapter titles: "The Beginnings of Life", "The Rise of the Ferns", "The Flowering of the World". I want a company to come woo me with dinner and wine and river cruises too (perhaps not the last) - it would be a nice change from begging for a job. Minzhi's place briefly on Sunday night to say goodbye and beer and conversation on Monday night and then I made all kinds of resolutions to do work in the week which I didn't keep. Oh! Bak chor mee at Fengshan, because Kang Jet had the use of his car (Shin Gee/Rosa: So this place only opens for dinner? Me/Kang Jet: Er. Never been here so early before. The important thing to remember is that this place opens until 3 a.m..) and then Bark Cafe at Changi Chapel. I think we should return to Changi Chapel in the daylight, just because. The next weekend was the ACSian theatre production of Chekov's Three Sisters, which was unconvincing. It's possible that lines like "but all the poetry has gone out of my work!" cannot be said with a straight face today. Bar and Billiard Theatre after that where more people came and we managed thoroughly confused Judy's Hungarian friend and then the waiter said hi to Jo. (I tugged on XZ's sleeve as the whole bunch of us walked in and said, I don't think I'm dressed enough for this place. He: That's ok, not everyone's dressed up. Me: I don't think I'm old enough for this place.) Are we at the Chinese New Year week yet? Monday night and Tuesday afternoon spent looking at lomographs and old black-and-white photos of a Japanese sushi chef in Nakano, Wednesday eating too many pineapple tarts and fending off relatives, Thursday at the Beach Bar (bless Louise and her car) where Joanne gave me a piece of green chalk, and then Mortoni's and Balaclava on Friday night (why do we go to Bala?) and crawled through Saturday trying not to move too much.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Instead of a Letter
Minzhi lent me Diana Athill's Instead of a Letter before she left and so I read it, and then read it again, slowly, and then again as if it were the first time. More than anything else I have read in a long time this book resonates in me - I know this woman, and I have been in her place many times - more in the unhappy times than the happy times, simply because we were born into very different worlds.
Some passages.
I was hungry to be alive, so I was hungry to love - but was I hungry, in fact, for the companionship of those particular men, or of the third one, unmarried but not in love with me, whose reservations about me turned a lively attraction into infatuation so that I did not fall in love with him, but might have been jumping off a cliff? I have always shrunk from the idea of possessiveness, I have never tried to mould people into my own idea of them, and I have been satisfied with myself because of this; I have considered it a virtue. It may have been in part the virtue I took it to be, but I suspect now that it had other aspects as well: that if I did not grab at people, I grabbed at emotion, and that for many years the most intense emotion I could conceive of was one of pain.
*
Some people take refuge from emptiness in activity and excesses. They are the ones, I suppose, who cannot sleep for it. Mine was a dormouse escape, a hibernation. Instead of being unable to sleep I slept to excess, thinking lovingly of my bed during the day and getting into it with pleasure. Sleep for me has always been dreamless yet not negative, as though oblivion were a consciously welcomed good, so the only thing to dread about my nights was the slow, heavy emergence from them when an unthinking lack of enthusiasm for the days into which they pitched me made getting up an almost intolerable effort. Sleep at night, and a cautious huddling within limits during the day: walking to work along the same streets, eating the same meals, going back to the same room, then reading. In theory I longed to depart from this pattern and felt sorry for myself when I did not, but although I would have liked to have lived differently, the smallest alteration seemed to be beyond my energies. I had to be feeling unusually well before I could go so far as to take a bus to the National Gallery on a day off, instead of sleeping all the morning and reading all the afternoon.
Within these absurd limitations imposed on me by inertia, there were palliatives to be found: the company of the few friends then accessible - and that I do not say more about my friends is because their lives are their own affair, not because they are not precious to me - and the books I read, and the little life spun within the walls of the office, which was often amusing. The intimacy between people working together is an agreeable thing and very real, in spite of the disconcerting way in which it vanishes as soon as the same people meet each other in different circumstances. And always, at any time, I could look at things, whether at leaves unfolding on a plane tree, or at people's faces in a bus, or at a pigeon strutting after its mate on a roof, or at pictures.
*
The sensation of happiness itself is one for which I have only a physical vocabulary: warmth, expansion, floating, opening, relaxation. This was so from its beginning, and has become more with its confirmation in love. Unintellectual, unspiritual as I am, I have always identified closely with my body: for most of the time I am it and it is me. What happens to me physically is therefore of great importance to my general condition - a disposition threatening serious problems in illness or old age, but conducive to an especial happiness in love. To split the relationship of love into 'physical' and 'mental' is something which I cannot do. Making love is not a fugitive good, contained only in the time in which it is being done: it is, each time, an addition, an expansion of a whole happiness. I have never in the past known it to be quite wiped out by subsequent events, and I know that it will not be wiped out now. This final way of communication is one of the things which, like my feeling for Beckton and Oxford, I know to be stored in me: a good which I have experienced, which enters into and is entered by everything I see and hear and feel and smell, and of which I can only be deprived by the decay of consciousness. That when two people have lived together for several years their love-making loses its value is, in most cases, obvious, and I should expect it to do so with me: I should expect that only if the man I was living with and I were really as well suited as we had first believed would the habit of companionship and interdependence successfully supersede physical delight. But I do not see that this would discredit physical delight. If it exists, it will always have existed. Now, therefore, that it exists again for me, I am by that much richer to the end of my days.
So happiness, followed by love and increased by it, has for me the colour of physical pleasure although it embraces many other things and although it seems to be me to mean something larger than my own emotions and sensations. This is a period in which many people are concerned with the difficulty of communication. Poetry, novels, plays, paintings: they emphasize this theme so constantly that anyone who feels that human beings can communicate is beginning to look naive. But what is meeting a man from a different country, a different tradition, a different social and economic background, and finding that you and he can both speak about anything exactly as you feel, in perfect confidence of understanding even if not of agreement, if it is not communication? The discovery of trust and easiness which comes with such a meeting is another, and greater, enduring good.
Some passages.
I was hungry to be alive, so I was hungry to love - but was I hungry, in fact, for the companionship of those particular men, or of the third one, unmarried but not in love with me, whose reservations about me turned a lively attraction into infatuation so that I did not fall in love with him, but might have been jumping off a cliff? I have always shrunk from the idea of possessiveness, I have never tried to mould people into my own idea of them, and I have been satisfied with myself because of this; I have considered it a virtue. It may have been in part the virtue I took it to be, but I suspect now that it had other aspects as well: that if I did not grab at people, I grabbed at emotion, and that for many years the most intense emotion I could conceive of was one of pain.
*
Some people take refuge from emptiness in activity and excesses. They are the ones, I suppose, who cannot sleep for it. Mine was a dormouse escape, a hibernation. Instead of being unable to sleep I slept to excess, thinking lovingly of my bed during the day and getting into it with pleasure. Sleep for me has always been dreamless yet not negative, as though oblivion were a consciously welcomed good, so the only thing to dread about my nights was the slow, heavy emergence from them when an unthinking lack of enthusiasm for the days into which they pitched me made getting up an almost intolerable effort. Sleep at night, and a cautious huddling within limits during the day: walking to work along the same streets, eating the same meals, going back to the same room, then reading. In theory I longed to depart from this pattern and felt sorry for myself when I did not, but although I would have liked to have lived differently, the smallest alteration seemed to be beyond my energies. I had to be feeling unusually well before I could go so far as to take a bus to the National Gallery on a day off, instead of sleeping all the morning and reading all the afternoon.
Within these absurd limitations imposed on me by inertia, there were palliatives to be found: the company of the few friends then accessible - and that I do not say more about my friends is because their lives are their own affair, not because they are not precious to me - and the books I read, and the little life spun within the walls of the office, which was often amusing. The intimacy between people working together is an agreeable thing and very real, in spite of the disconcerting way in which it vanishes as soon as the same people meet each other in different circumstances. And always, at any time, I could look at things, whether at leaves unfolding on a plane tree, or at people's faces in a bus, or at a pigeon strutting after its mate on a roof, or at pictures.
*
The sensation of happiness itself is one for which I have only a physical vocabulary: warmth, expansion, floating, opening, relaxation. This was so from its beginning, and has become more with its confirmation in love. Unintellectual, unspiritual as I am, I have always identified closely with my body: for most of the time I am it and it is me. What happens to me physically is therefore of great importance to my general condition - a disposition threatening serious problems in illness or old age, but conducive to an especial happiness in love. To split the relationship of love into 'physical' and 'mental' is something which I cannot do. Making love is not a fugitive good, contained only in the time in which it is being done: it is, each time, an addition, an expansion of a whole happiness. I have never in the past known it to be quite wiped out by subsequent events, and I know that it will not be wiped out now. This final way of communication is one of the things which, like my feeling for Beckton and Oxford, I know to be stored in me: a good which I have experienced, which enters into and is entered by everything I see and hear and feel and smell, and of which I can only be deprived by the decay of consciousness. That when two people have lived together for several years their love-making loses its value is, in most cases, obvious, and I should expect it to do so with me: I should expect that only if the man I was living with and I were really as well suited as we had first believed would the habit of companionship and interdependence successfully supersede physical delight. But I do not see that this would discredit physical delight. If it exists, it will always have existed. Now, therefore, that it exists again for me, I am by that much richer to the end of my days.
So happiness, followed by love and increased by it, has for me the colour of physical pleasure although it embraces many other things and although it seems to be me to mean something larger than my own emotions and sensations. This is a period in which many people are concerned with the difficulty of communication. Poetry, novels, plays, paintings: they emphasize this theme so constantly that anyone who feels that human beings can communicate is beginning to look naive. But what is meeting a man from a different country, a different tradition, a different social and economic background, and finding that you and he can both speak about anything exactly as you feel, in perfect confidence of understanding even if not of agreement, if it is not communication? The discovery of trust and easiness which comes with such a meeting is another, and greater, enduring good.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Number games
Walked into my brother's room to return his calculator and found him sprawled on the bed on the phone. He [to me]: You're doing work? You use numbers at work?
Learning on the job
There's a survey in the UK which revealed two of the most popular places for jackpot winners to keep their tickets: "in their Bibles" and "in their underwear". (Courtesy of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport website.)