He Was A Lovely Man

It Is, Perhaps, A Better Thing To Be Valued Only As An Object Of Passion Than Never To Be Valued At All.

His Touch Both Consoles And Devastates Me; I Feel My Heart Pulse, Then Wither, Naked As A Stone On The Roaring Mattress While The Lovely, Moony Night Slides Through The Window To Dapple The Flanks Of This Innocent Who Makes Cages To Keep The Sweet Birds In. Eat Me, Drink Me; Thirsty, Cankered, Goblin-ridden, I Go Back And Back To Him To Have His Fingers Strip The Tattered Skin Away And Clothe Me In His Dress Of Water, This Garment That Drenches Me, Its Slithering Odour, Its Capacity For Drowning.

They Were Connoisseurs Of Boredom. They Savoured The Various Bouquets Of The Subtly Differentiated Boredoms Which Rose From The Long, Wasted Hours At The Dead End Of Night.

F.r. Leavis's "eat Up Your Broccoli" Approach To Fiction Emphasises This Junkfood/wholefood Dichotomy. If Reading A Novel--for Theeighteenth Century Reader, The Most Frivolous Of Diversions--did Not, By The Middle Of The Twentieth Century, Make You A Better Person In Some Way, Then You Might As Well Flush The Offending Volume Down The Toilet, Which Was By Far The Best Place For The Undigested Excreta Of Dubious Nourishment.

I Think It's One Of The Scars In Our Culture That We Have Too High An Opinion Of Ourselves. We Align Ourselves With The Angels Instead Of The Higher Primates.