My most pervasive memory of young childhood, however, is of being in ‘a mood’, which really consisted of just the one mood in several shades of monochrome: a spectrum that ranged from a comforting solitary dreaminess inside a softly enclosing gentle shadow at one end to, at the far side of the continuum, the grimmest darkness in a hard-frozen, fractured icescape. Always it was me on the inside, them out there, beyond my enclosure, unable to reach in. And me, sometimes not wanting, sometimes not able, to reach out.
- Jenny Diski
descensus Averno facilis est
Showing posts with label jenny diski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jenny diski. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Sunday, December 1, 2013
boredom
I’ve never understood about boredom. I realise that with time and
repetition all pleasures can run out. Yelling in our cots and watching
them come to hover over us anxiously; sex; TV; reading; long walks on
frosty afternoons if that is the sort of thing you like; drugs, even;
everything palls, eventually. But how can anyone be bored when there’s
always death to think about? Every day. Every hour. Don’t you? All the
rest is just evading or glossing the real subject of our lives. Beckett,
again, the maestro of death: Never but the one matter. The dead and
gone. The dying and the going. From the word go. I too shall cease and
be as when I was not yet, only all over instead of in store.
- Jenny Diski
- Jenny Diski
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jenny diski
I love this woman.
14 June 2010 -- Staying In
My old friend Michael, a painter, called me the other day. We've been friends since we were troubled teenagers in and out of loony bins, morosely drinking and drugging away our days, and pretty much given up on by everyone. Michael and I talk on the phone now and then to giggle with astonishment at the way we've managed to arrange our lives so that we find ourselves doing what we want — painting, writing, getting on with it quietly. "I don't speak to anyone all day long. I go for a walk every day, then work, and it's all in silence," he said, delighted with his achievement. "Same here," I said. "But I only go out once a week."
Michael gasped at the level of my accomplishment.
It's not merely silence I want, but uneventfulness, and continuing uneventfulness at that. I have a rush of wellbeing if I see a blank week in my calendar. An appointment during the week darkens it, and gnaws away at me in the background of whatever I'm doing until the event (even a pleasurable one) is over and done with. You can call it neurotic, or what you will, but reclusiveness works for me.
From The Sunday Times, June 6th 2010
- Jenny Diski
My old friend Michael, a painter, called me the other day. We've been friends since we were troubled teenagers in and out of loony bins, morosely drinking and drugging away our days, and pretty much given up on by everyone. Michael and I talk on the phone now and then to giggle with astonishment at the way we've managed to arrange our lives so that we find ourselves doing what we want — painting, writing, getting on with it quietly. "I don't speak to anyone all day long. I go for a walk every day, then work, and it's all in silence," he said, delighted with his achievement. "Same here," I said. "But I only go out once a week."
Michael gasped at the level of my accomplishment.
It's not merely silence I want, but uneventfulness, and continuing uneventfulness at that. I have a rush of wellbeing if I see a blank week in my calendar. An appointment during the week darkens it, and gnaws away at me in the background of whatever I'm doing until the event (even a pleasurable one) is over and done with. You can call it neurotic, or what you will, but reclusiveness works for me.
From The Sunday Times, June 6th 2010
- Jenny Diski
Labels:
jenny diski
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