“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them.” TS Eliot
‘Thanks or no thanks to two hearing aids, I can eavesdrop on my own body. I can hear my stomach gurgle and my ankles groan, which I find disturbing, at one point mistaking it for creaking floorboards’ Alan Bennett
Those were yeasty times.
"Memory is not false in the sense that it is wilfully bad," Diski says, "but it is excitingly corrupt in its inclination to make a proper story of the past." Her impulse to go to Antarctica doesn't come from a desire to travel but from an addiction to the “boundless expanses of white" she remembers from her time in a psychiatric.
Wheeler offers Raban's description of Morris in her prime, and it captures her perfectly: "She was a proper traveller with the traveller's gift for swimming in the stream without drowning in it... sensible jeans and sensible blouse, a sensible headscarf... She spoke in an eager alto, with a trace of dry rust around its edges, leaping from emphasis to emphasis, alighting for a second on a word in italics, like a chalk-hill blue in a meadow of dogroses... I felt sincere, unstinting admiration for the careless, artful style with which she had made herself at home in this singular and alien landscape."
The pleasure steamers
‘For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent.’ The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
Desire blown up by loss and longing.
An hour already with nothing to stare at but crab apples in the gravel.
