Perhaps (he said cautiously, looking around to make sure nothing was about to fall on his head) nothing bad will happen around this birthday at all.
It doesn't always; it's just something I keep as a reassurance in reserve for the Bad Birthdays – which, for me, mostly mean the ones where nothing happens, where I wonder whether anybody remembers. There were particular bleak periods in my life that were like that; probably I've dug in roots of relationship with enough people that it's not likely to happen again for a long time – as it's improbable that I'll live long enough to be in some sort of nursing home, I may escape it at that end of my life. (So I don't need to consider the whole problem of Who Cares About Old Gay Guys?, as I won't be around to worry about it.)
Woolf's diary again, the exaltation that comes in and out of the entries around 1920, when the novels are a success and she feels she can concentrate on writing, on her subtle inner world. The developing relationship with Katherine Mansfield – which seems to exist only at the highest level: their everyday relationship is irritable and discomfortable, the truth is that from an everyday point of view they don't really like each other. But when they talk at that highest level, Woolf says that they can almost talk without translation – as though there's a pure space of understanding there.
Of course you can also see Mansfield is clearly in trouble at this point – she's getting ill enough that there isn't much left of her life.
But the sheer focus, the concentration, on what matters: we should spend our whole lives on that – although I am so incompetent at focusing on that exaltation of understanding, I resent all the time I have spent over the decades not focused on it. We should have time and support to do nothing else, because it is after all the only important thing there is to do: an analyst, for one thing (I don't mean a therapist, I mean an analyst – someone whose profession is to help us understand why we are the way we are); maybe a few priests of various rather flexible religions around; hillsides, small houses, friends. Not much in the shape of tedious work; many books, no televisions. A reasonable life....
Well, it seems I have fallen into some utopian daydream, something William Morris-y. But the day is bright and clear, and despite the still relatively pointless task of giving this talk today, preceded by a haircut, followed by putting medications in little bags for the coming month, there is this sense that I have all the time in the world: that the constraints, the boredom, that I complain about so often are all smoke and spiderwebs, that one can simply walk right through them....
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