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.