At 12 O'clock in the afternoon/in the middle of the street-/Alexis.
Summer had all but brought the fruit/to it's perilous end:/and the summer sun and that boy's look
did their work on me./Night hid the sun./Your face consumes my dreams
Others feel sleep as feathered rest;/mine but in flame refigures/your image lit in me.
- Meleager (c.140-70 BC)

the above comes from this book i've been ploughing through called 'Death, desire and loss in Western Culture'. another addition to the 'death studies' section of the bookcase (Durkheim, Al Alvarez, Timothy Taylor etc. so far). is it relevant? i have been smoking so much recently, the weekend of Beth's birthday (bop, club, dinner party in sucession) being the 'killer', so i guess death is sort of present. and desire could well be my natural state. Tom tried to talk to me about such things during the piss up evening. he was tickled when i talked about boys. "I've never seen you in love before" he said. "If only you knew Tom", i thought.

what i like about this myth of the inner is that it provides a sense of intimacy between me and a person and also suggests a depth that i haven't yet and perhaps won't ever get through. thus it prevents me from feeling utterly bored towards my friends.

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at the last bop of term i was talking to Adam about the video to N-Trance's 'Set you free' (which was playing at the time). i told him how when i was growing up i thought that Real Life was going to be just like that video - driving all around dear old dismal England in an open-top limo and loving it. what was tragic, i told him, about this was not simply that Real Life (if this is it) turned out to be quite unlike this video's image of cold-weather debauchery; the tragedy is that life dissapoints and one adjusts to it.
"well" he said, after a pause, "limos aren't that much to hire anymore".

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yesterday i went to the Rubens show at the NG, which was a bit flat, a bit subtle and academic, apart from maybe three or four really excellent canvases. then in the evening i went to Billy Budd at the Colisseum. i got last minute reduced tickets in the gods so i took Mummy's old Opera glasses out for the first time in forever. the sound was great but the diction seemed a bit lacking - this could well be a question of acoustics, though ENO seems to be getting a lot of stick for poor pronounciation recently. i hardly know Britten much but the opera fascinates me - so many sources, so many inputs (Melville, Britten, Forster, Crozier, even Pears)and so many ideas about its 'message' (or messages?). probably more decisively the sections concerning it (at the opera and recounted in James' diary) in 'The swimming-pool library' are probably my favourite bits of one of my favourite books.

i like going out on my own. it leaves me feeling sad, sometimes, but i like it. i don't realise, i think, that very often i allow - even encourage - msyelf to be dissapointed by situations which i probably wouldn't really have any other way. i think at the moment - and this is something to do with the time of year - about what my life will be like when i am alone. when i will live with, as it is put in James' diaries 'that terrible feeling that no one ever notices me or remembers me'. the thinking i do at this time of year, of the the cool, third person sort that comes with winter cold, is trying to know whether that kind of aloneness might be all that bad.
i don't know if i believe in destiny but i belive in psychology, which isn't so different. i have been thinking this week about a blogger i once met, a photographer, who seems to live with everyday difficulties so much more intense than mine - so much less spending money, so much more self-harm, so much more serious depression. scrolling though old posts it seems in 2004 year he was admitted to a 'psychiatric hospital'. all this and somehow i just don't feel sorry for him. i can't quite take the idea of him as 'hard done by' seriously. too much happens to him to warrant my sympathy. the worst condition of life just can't consist in such motion, no matter its lows, its sharpness. the worst of life is its stultification, surely; its shabbiness.

this excerpt from Waugh was not quite as i remembered it:

'I don't think that sounds very much like life', said Paul rather sadly.
'Oh but it is, though. You see, the nearer you can get to the hub of the wheel the slower it is moving and the easier it is to stay on. There's generally someone in the centre who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance. Often he's paid by the management, though, or at any rate, he's allowed in free. Of course at the very centre there's a point completely at rest, if one could only find it: I'm not sure I am not very near that point myself. Of course the professional men get in the way. Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again. How they all shriek and giggle! Then there are others, like Margot, who sit as far out as they can can and hold on for dear life and enjoy that. But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all, if you don't want to...It doesn't suit everyone'
...
'Now you're a person who was clearly meant to stay in the seats and sit still and if you get bored watch the others. Somehow you got on to the wheel, and you got thrown off again at once with a hard bump. It's all right for Margot, who can cling on, and for me, at the centre, but you're static. Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic. There's a real distinction there, though i can't tell you how it comes. I think we're probably two quite different species spiritually.
'I used the idea of the wheel in a cinema film once. I think it rather sounds like it, don't you? What was it I came back for?'
'A nail file.'
'Oh yes, of course. I know of no more utterly boring and futile occupation than generalizing about life. Did you take in what I was saying?'
'Yes, I think so.'
'I think I shall have my meals alone in future. Will you tell the servants? It makes me feel quite ill to talk so much...'