History Isn't What Happened, History Is Just

I Have At Times Tried To Imagine The Despair Which Leads To Suicide, Attempted To Conjure Up The Slew And Slop Of Darkness In Which Only Death Appears As A Pinprick Of Light: In Other Words, The Exact Opposite Of The Normal Condition Of Life.

Is Despair Wrong? Isn’t It The Natural Condition Of Life After A Certain Age? … After A Number Of Events, What Is There Left But Repetition And Diminishment? Who Wants To Go On Living? The Eccentric, The Religious, The Artistic (sometimes); Those With A False Sense Of Their Own Worth. Soft Cheeses Collapse; Firm Cheeses Endurate. Both Go Mouldy.

I'm Interested In Such Things As The Difference Between How We Perceive The World And What The World Turns Out To Be. The Difference Is Between The Stories We Tell Others And The Stories We Tell Ourselves. There Is A Wonderful Russian Saying, Which I Use As The Epigraph Of One Of My Novels, Which Goes, He Lies Like An Eyewitness. Which Is Very Sly, Clever And True.

And Perhaps It Was Also The Case That, For All A Lifetime's Internal Struggling, You Were Finally No More Than What Others Saw You As. That Was Your Nature, Whether You Liked It Or Not.

Most Of Us Remember Adolescence As A Kind Of Double Negative: No Longer Allowed To Be Children, We Are Not Yet Capable Of Being Adults.