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Oxford, London, University College Hospital, Suburbia as usual. I had not realized, and nor had my contemporaries, that the world, the small part of it that was the British Empire, was not as usual, any more than a familiar landscape is ‘as usual’ just before a Krakatoa erupts. The earth's crust, or the molten sea of lava beneath – as usual?
Just as molten rock solidifies into lava so did the emotional turbulence – white hot energy, revolt, rebellion – cool and solidify into further layers of crystallized debris as it welled up, not only in the world of men and women but also in that minute particle of it of which I have experience and which I am able to observe for myself. As I become aware of thoughts and feelings of my own they become identified. A gross example is this writing which is inseparable from making marks on paper: some of them are marks of a kind which conform to accepted rules of grammar, articulate speech; others do not. I cannot know what it is my intention to record until I have recorded it; and then I shall not know what I have recorded nor what it is of which I am a record. In this respect I do not differ from the fossil which is, unknowingly, the record of something which a sentient being observes and then tries to understand the meaning of what he has observed. So I have, snail-like, left my trace on this piece of paper. If I were a great artist I might leave a sculpture of the god Hermes; it would cause someone to say, “Praxiteles passed this way.”
All this is damnably uninteresting. What happened to the girl who sent the roses? Do for God's sake get on with the story.
I am – blast you – if you wouldn't keep interrupting.
I am silent.
What happened to the girl? I wrote to her – I do not now know what. She came to London to study a branch of para-medical skill.
I thought I was in love. I proposed marriage one evening inside St James's Park.
It sounds just like Gilbert and Sullivan – ‘I heard the minx remark she'll meet him after dark and give him