I Have Van Gogh's Ear

I Suppose That There Is No Point Wasting Time Being Lazy, Though Of Course Indolence In A Divine Way, Actually Has Its Advantages.

Lectures Broke Into One's Day And Were Clearly A Terrible Waste Of Time, Necessary No Doubt If You Were Reading Law Or Medicine Or Some Other Vocational Subject, But In The Case Of English, The Natural Thing To Do Was Talk A Lot, Listen To Music, Drink Coffee And Wine, Read Books, And Go To Plays, Perhaps Be In Plays.

I Remember Nothing Of This, No Ambulance Rides, Nothing. Nothing Between Switching Out The Bedside Lamp And The Sudden Indignity Of Rebirth: The Slaps, The Brightness, The Tubing, The Speed, The Urgent Insistence That I Be Choked Back Into Breathing Life. I Have Felt So Sorry For Babies Ever Since.

Great Writers, I Discovered, Were Not To Be Bowed Down Before And Worshipped, But Embraced And Befriended. Their Names Resounded Through History Not Because They Had Massive Brows And Thought Deep Incomprehensible Thoughts, But Because They Opened Windows In The Mind, They Put Their Arms Round You And Showed You Things You Always Knew But Never Dared To Believe. Even If Their Names Were Terrifyingly Foreign And Intellectual Sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire Or Cavafy, They Turned Out To Be Charming And Wonderful And Quite Unalarming After All.

I Expected The Illegible And The Deeply Buried In Me To Be Read As If Carved On My Forehead, Just As I Expected The Obvious And The Ill-concealed To Be Hidden From View.