“She hadn’t caught me, obviously enough, at a very erotic moment in my life. I had never been much of a pickup artist–a few ghastly encounters in my twenties had seen to that–and the alternative prospect of a euphoric romance not only exhausted me but, in fact, struck me as impossible. This wasn’t because of any fidelity to my absent wife or some aversion to sex, which, I like to think, grabs me as much as the next man. No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

“It was the boredom that comes of being cut off from everything that could make life sweet, or arouse curiosity, or enlarge the range of the senses. It was the boredom the comes of having to perform endless tasks that have no savour and acquire skills one would gladly be without. I learned to march and drill and shoot and keep myself clean according to Army standards; to make my bed and polish my boots and my buttons and to wrap lengths of dung-colored rag around my legs in the approved way. None of it had any great reality for … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature