Well, we’ve both had that particular error ground out of us in different ways – me by achieving precisely nothing in over a decade of adult life, and you (if you’ll forgive me) by achieving as much as you possibly could and still not making one grain of difference to the smooth functioning of the capitalist system. The ideas were right, but the mistake was that we thought we mattered. When I look back on what we were like when we first met, I don’t think we were really wrong about anything, except about ourselves. “But do you ever experience a sort of diluted, personalised version of that feeling, as if your own life, your own world, has slowly but perceptibly become an uglier place? Or even a sense that while you used to be in step with the cultural discourse, you’re not anymore, and you feel yourself adrift from the world of ideas, alienated, with no intellectual home? Maybe it is about our specific historical moment, or maybe it’s just about getting older and disillusioned, and it happens to everyone.
I never looked at things anymore, in the way I had before.” I suppose I was seeing but not looking – the visual world just came to me flat, like a catalogue of information. I would walk to work or go out for groceries or whatever and by the time I came home again I wouldn’t be able to remember seeing or hearing anything distinctive at all. It wasn’t just that I failed to be delighted by sensory experiences – it was that I didn’t actually seem to have them anymore. At that point, I found it impossible to imagine ever feeling again as I had apparently once felt about rain or flowers. I started to put the diary away for weeks at a time – it was just a cheap black notebook I got at work – and then eventually I’d take it back out to look at the entries from the previous year. When I did make entries, they were increasingly verbal and abstract: song titles, or quotes from novels, or text messages from friends. Sometimes I would fall asleep without remembering to write anything, but then other nights I’d open the book and not know what to write – I wouldn’t be able to think of anything at all. There was something delicate about living like that – like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.Īfter a couple of months, I started to miss days. And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them.
The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things. “Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things – I mean just the things that were in front of me.
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