And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living.

Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.

To attend to something and yet want nothing from it, these seemed to be the essentials of the second way of perceiving. I thought that in the ordinary way when we want nothing from any object or situation we ignore it. Or if we are forced to attend to something which does not offer us any means of furthering our desires, then sheer habit makes us attend in the narrow focus way, looking at separate details and being bored. But if by chance we should have discovered the knack of holding wide our attention, then the magic thing happens.

Given the outlandish quality of some hypnopompic images, their often terrifying emotional resonance, and perhaps the heightened suggestibility that may go with such states, it is very understandable that hypnopompic visions of angels and devils may engender not only wonder or horror but belief in their physical reality. Indeed, one must wonder to what degree the very idea of monsters, ghostly spirits, or phantoms originated with such hallucinations. One can easily imagine that, coupled with a personal or cultural disposition to believe in a disembodied, spiritual realm, these hallucinations, though they have a real physiological basis, might reinforce a belief in the supernatural.

I repeat that I have never been plagued by visions, but actual objects sometimes seem to me to assume a human shape in a grandiose style. Thus, one day the cushion which my head has been pressing during a midday siesta, looks like a marble head carved in the style of Michelangelo. One evening when I return home in the company of the “double” of the American empiric doctor, I discover, in the half-shadow of the alcove where my bed is, what looks like a gigantic Zeus reposing on it. Before this unexpected sight my friend remains seized with an almost religious fear. His artistic eye comprehends at once the beauty of the outline. “There is a great forgotten art,” he says, “born again! That is where we ought to learn drawing!” The more one looks at it, the more lifelike and terrible it appears. Obviously, the spirits have become realists like the rest of us mortals. It is no mere accident, for on certain days the cushion takes the shape of terrible monsters, such as Gothic dragons and serpents; and one night after I have spent a hilarious evening, I am greeted on my return by a medieval demon, a devil with horned head and other appurtenances.

There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things.

I would perhaps be the chill of an April wind, an essential part of some indomitable river or be personally concerned in the ageless perfection of some rank mountain bearing down upon the mind by occupying forever a position in the blue easy distance. Or perhaps a smaller thing like movement in the grass on an unbearable breathless yellow day, some hidden creature going about its business – I might well be responsible for that or for some important part of it. Or even those unaccountable distinctions that make an evening recognizable from its own morning, the smells and sounds and sights of the perfected and matured essences of the day, these might not be innocent of my meddling and my abiding presence.

“A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.”

There was so much time that marvellous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic – ‘Now you don’t see; indeed, there is nothing to see. Now look!’ Day after day it was like that and each morning I leaned on the yard gate dragging at my first fag and (I’d like to think) marvelling at this splendid backcloth. But it can’t have been so; I’m not the marvelling kind. Or was I then? But one thing is sure – I had a feeling of immense content and, if I thought at all, it was that I’d like this to go on and on, no-one going, no-one coming, autumn and winter always loitering around the corner, summer’s ripeness lasting for ever, nothing disturbing the even tenor of my way (as I think someone may have said before me).

Ah, those days … for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young. If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvellous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.

I followed this straight southern track for several days, living on figs and ears of wheat. Sometimes I’d hide from the sun under the wayside poplars, face downwards, watching the ants. There was really no hurry. I was going nowhere. Nowhere at all but here. Close to the spicy warmth of this foreign ground a few inches away from my face. Never in my life had I felt so fat with time, so free of the need to be moving or doing. For hours I could watch some manic ant dragging a piece of orange peel through the grass, pushing and pulling against impossible barriers in a confused and directionless frenzy.

The actual time on the way from Chicago was short, but the overwhelming size and variety of the land, the many incidents and people along the way, had stretched time out of all bearing. For it is not true that an uneventful time in the past is remembered as fast. On the contrary, it takes the time-stones of events to give a memory past dimension. Eventlessness collapses time.

They couldn’t stand the discomfort that arose from being forced to acknowledge their limited control over the speed of the creative process—and so they sought to escape it, either by not getting down to work at all, or by rushing headlong into stressful all-day writing binges, which led to procrastination later on, because it made them learn to hate the whole endeavor.

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing.

If I think I must write one book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write.

The feeling was peculiarly bonding, her face so close to mine, smiling, and her touch so intimate and gentle that I felt the lightness of being that comes from having the skin delicately touched. This became even more pronounced when she attached the electrodes to my head, my scalp fizzing from how gently she was touching me, a feeling I’ve always associated with the giddiness of haircuts as a child: a stranger lightly handling my skull as if tapping a balloon through a thicket of thorns.

‘K… R…’ said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say ‘Kay Arr’ close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed — that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!

I was awakened next morning by the high clear voice of a boy singing in the street below. The sound lifted me gradually with a swaying motion as though I was being cradled on silken cords. It was cool crisp singing, full-throated and pure, and surely the most painless way to be wakened – and as I lay there listening, with the sun filtering across me, I thought this was how it should always be. To be charmed from sleep by a voice like this, eased softly back into life, rather than by the customary brutalities of shouts, knocking, and alarm-bells like blows on the head. The borders of consciousness are anxious enough, raw and desperate places; we shouldn’t be dragged across them like struggling thieves as if sleep was a felony.

The glass of absinthe at six o’clock, and the terrace of the Brewery of Lilas behind the statue of Marshal Ney, are my only remaining sin and delight. There, after finishing the day’s work, when soul and body are exhausted, I refresh myself with the green drink, a cigarette, the Temps, and the Débuts. How sweet is life after all, when the mist of a mild intoxication casts its veil over the miseries of existence.

But I think my most lasting impression was still the unhurried dignity and noblesse with which the Spaniard handled his drink. He never gulped, panicked, pleaded with the barman, or let himself be shouted into the street. Drink, for him, was one of the natural privileges of living, rather than the temporary suicide it so often is for others. But then it was lightly taxed here, and there were no licensing laws; and under such conditions one could take one’s time.

“If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.”

I could have been kinder to Mrs Weskitt, but there isn’t a child of twelve who couldn’t. It’s the age when we sort into different not alike, a state that reaches its peak in adolescence, and one of the foremost blights in the world today is that many adults have never grown out of that adolescent pose of insisting on difference.

As a child, if I cried and said, ‘This is too difficult, I can't do it’, someone came and helped me. Now I found myself one day unwilling to admit I was happy because of a vague sense that I might thereby forgo some advantage, might give up my claim to that special attention which seemed to be the prerogative of the miserable.

I want to change my attitudes; it fills me with restlessness that I am always striving after something and I don't know what it is. I envy people, artists chiefly. I want to achieve the play attitude. By this I mean concentration in an activity which has no apparent use just for the delight of doing it. Why do I want this? I don't know quite, it just seems very desirable.

I was always wanting people to be either all lovable or all hateful. When I was getting on well with someone everything they said was right and nothing was too good for them. Then, if some chance altered the emotional situation between us, they would become hateful to me, I would see all their weak points and fail to remember that they had ever had any good ones at all.

The idea that our lives fulfil God’s purpose is supposed to give them their point, in a way that doesn’t require or admit of any further point. One isn’t supposed to ask “What is the point of God?” any more than one is supposed to ask, “What is the explanation of God?”

People in situations like this usually just make something up. Most of the time we don’t really know what reasons we had in the past for doing something. But we invent an explanation, and then we begin to believe our made-up story.

I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

I would feel that I had made a crazy ascent into the stratosphere but had come back empty-handed and had nothing to show for it; that the experience had been as empty and vacuous as it was intense.

Sometimes, leaving the road, I would walk into the sea and pull it voluptuously over my head, and stand momentarily drowned in the cool blind silence, in a salt-stung neutral nowhere.

It must have been his basic mediocre brain that drew people to him; he was like an animal who’s too much of an animal to comprehend the inevitability of his own death, and that kind of person is always a comfort.

All that he felt was the misery of a new misfortune, and, as was his nature, he sat dumb under it.

He had learned to regard suffering as the only real joy in life, and so had attained to resignation.