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.

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.

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.

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.”

You can always tell when it hits you but never when it unhits, if it ever does. It impairs you forever or you think so; you can't be sure. Maybe it never leaves. And they say, Hey, man, your brain's burned out, and you say, Maybe so. You can't be sure and you can't not be sure.

OF course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.

There occur in life such terrible incidents that the mind refuses to retain the memory of them for a moment, but the impression remains and becomes irresistibly alive again.

But if my aim in talking was mainly sociable – to get on with other people, to make friends – quite clearly there must be a lot of things which I did not talk about. For my private worries would bore others and my private foibles perhaps shock them. What then would happen to ideas on matters which were never talked of because I should feel too ashamed? I had never asked myself this question before, for I had grown up with a hatred of having my personal affairs discussed. When I listened to the personal talk of others I used sometimes to go hot all over, feeling it utterly impossible that I should ever talk like that about myself. I had thought that private affairs should be dealt with privately. What I had not realized was that usually, if I could not bear to deal with them in public, then they were also too painful to be dealt with in the privacy of my own mind. For, unless I was very clear what I was about, I tried to hide the painful thought just as urgently from my own eyes as from those of others.

As the time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words.

I’m not biochemically depressed. But I feel like I got to dip my toe in that wading pool and, um, not going back there is more important to me than anything. It’s like worse than anything—I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with this. It’s worse than any kind of physical injury, or any kind of—it may be what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis or whatever. It’s just feeling as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn’t function. And it was just, it was just horrible.

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.

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).