I write books about a chronic inability to relate to people or to talk to them or to form relationships of any meaningful kind (3rd Oct 2006)

I write books about a chronic inability to relate to people or to talk to them or to form relationships of any meaningful kind. About life lived with no companionship whatsoever even though much may be offered. AUTISMUS. BLACK NARCISSUS. THE COLD ICY AIR OF THE MOUNTAINS. CASANOVA. NOT OF —–. I go through life with no companionship, even though —– offered me companionship and I threw the chance away. The chance to get to know another human being, and to be known by another human being, and I threw it away. “The harder we search for someone else, the more likely we are to find ourselves.” “But it is not Turgenev’s writing that interests Dessaix most, it is his life. Specifically, the 40 years Turgenev spent in supposedly chaste devotion to mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, trotting around Europe after her—and her husband—like a fuddy-duddy lapdog”. “He puts off visiting sites and is ultimately uninterested in peeking under the sheet to discover if Turgenev slept with his muse”. “The greatest of the 19th-century novels always centred on the journey towards that moment when one person is known by another, and is transfigured—or believes she is transfigured, or wants to be transfigured—by intimacy. From Jane Austen to Charlotte Bronte to Tolstoy, novelists created and strengthened our faith in the absolute power of the love relationship to transform a life for good or ill”. “The American novelist Richard Yates died in 1992 with few of his books in print. His life was ‘a uniquely cheerless undertaking’…Yates ‘staggered from one badly paid teaching job to another, living in unbelievably squalid apartments and somehow writing further novels.” 

You wait so long for something special to happen in your life, that when it does, you just watch it in amazement & do not realise you have to make a move to catch it before it is gone and lost. A man on a desert island for 36 years finally sees a ship sailing by and is so shocked it is gone before he realises he should do something to make it stop. It is clear I have got to back and f–k either Demi or Pamela to cope with the pain of —–. I haven’t had sex since…Francesca on the 13th July, and both Francesca & Pamela the week before that. A lonely man, who never talks, just stands quietly on his own in the corner. When the girl he loves and pines for is just a few feet away on the other side of the pub, ready for him to talk to all night long if he wished, but still he stays on his own in the corner, talking to no one. 

I am Ernest Dowson, wandering around Europe after his rejection by Adelaide, suffering the torture of the damned. That is how I like to be. Pining for —–. Longing for —–. Bleeding for —–. I had a chance to get into her life and I let it go. 

“But despite his literary success, Crane was a profoundly tormented man. Poetry sustained him in a life that otherwise teetered on the brink of collapse. When he wasn’t writing, he spent much of his time engaged in fleeting homosexual encounters and alcohol binges. In 1932, three years after meeting Lorca, Crane committed suicide by leaping from a ship into the Caribbean”. 

I am a broken man. —– can see that now.