Read Intimacy for Free Online

general culture nothing can be understood. But the general culture isn’t getting me anywhere tonight. I can’t keep my loneliness and longing away.
    I must do something. But what?
    And, more importantly, why?
    At university I shared a flat with a friend, a handsome, intelligent man, who would sit at a table fordays with only a pack of cigarettes as distraction. People might come in and out of the flat; they might be troubled or unhappy, or might want excitement, sex. Yet still he would sit there. I don’t know if he was depressed, indifferent or stoical. But I envied him. Pursuing nothing, he waited. He and I discussed the possibility of living on cereal, eating it twice a day, with an orange for lunch. We discovered that one could survive on this regime for weeks without injury to one’s health, if not to one’s outlook. I expect to hear one day that he has killed himself.
    But to be able to bear one’s own mind, to wait while the inner storm of intolerable thoughts blows itself out, leaving one to contemplate the debris with some understanding – that is an enviable state of mind.

One makes mistakes
    *
    One makes mistakes, gets led astray, digresses. If one could see one’s crooked progress as a kind of experiment, without wishing for an impossible security – nothing interesting happens without daring – some kind of stillness might be attained.
    You can, of course, experiment with your own life. Maybe you shouldn’t do it with other people’s.

I like walking to school at lunch-time
    I like walking to school at lunch-time with my long-haired sons, pulling them along and joking with them. But as soon as we enter the Victorian playground, the smell and the teacher’s dogged look – her voice carries to the street – remind me of futility. If the teacher spoke to me as she does to my elder boy, I would smack her face. A braver man would take the boys home. But I drop them off and slip round to a quiet pub for a pint of Guinness, a read of the paper and a cigarette, glad it’s them and not me.
    I paid no attention to my schoolteachers. They had bored and scared me, unless their legs provided some compensation. But my first weeks at university shocked me into attention. I had to get home to read Teach Yourself books, and The Children’s Guide to …When there was no compulsion and my mind began to run, I got through Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Marx, Freud, Sartre.
    Philosophy was formal, abstract, cool. I chose it because I loved literature, and didn’t want stories that had been poisoned by theorizing. For me that was like food that had been chewed by other people. I am ready to study seriously again – music, poetry, history. At this age, coming to my senses as a human being at last, I am not done with learning. I know I am no longer ashamed of my ignorance, nor afraid of liking things.
    At university we went to the theatre several times a week, since my group of friends worked as dressers and ushers at the Royal Court, at the newly opened National, and at the RSC in the Aldwych. At the interval I would pick up girls in the audience. During the more boring plays they would slip out and talk to me. I have never found that the man being in a subordinate position has put women off. In fact, for some people, the more subordinate you are, the more ‘genuine’ they imagine you to be. People are afraid of too much power in others. But when I had these women I never quite knew what to do with them.

I am still standing upright
    *
    I am still standing upright, but something is moving and I would rather it didn’t. Yes, it is me. I seem to be swaying.
    I sit still a few minutes, head in hands, taking deep breaths, hoping for some deep calm. During one of our turbulent periods, Susan and I attended yoga classes in a hall at the end of the street. There were, in this class, many attractive women, most in bright leotards and all taking up adventurous positions reflected in the polished mirrors. In such