A Different Kind of Poverty

By Peter G. Brown

Set in the 1980s before the age of smart phones, computers and the internet, 24 year old diarist Nicholas narrates the difficulties, tragedies, failed relationships and intellectual obsessions that continually torment him.

But then he meets some people who are much worse off than himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jun 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781796008074

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 by Peter G. Brown.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/16/2022

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

"A different kind of poverty now upsets me so.

Night after sleepless night, I walk the floor and

I want to know why am I so alone?

Where is my woman can I bring her home?

Have I driven her away? Is she gone?"

Stephen Stills © Warner Music

For David Russell

writer, graphic artist and musician extraordinaire

A note to the reader

Set in the 1980s before the age of smart phones, computers

and the internet, 24 year old diarist Nicholas

narrates the difficulties, tragedies,

failed relationships and intellectual obsessions

that continually torment him.

But then he meets some people who are much worse off than himself.

Grateful acknowledgement is made

For the use of the following quotations

from the play Next Time I’ll Sing to You by James Saunders

"Question: where is grief most apparent? In the silence after a joke, in the

dusk after a sunset, in the loneliness where there is no escape" (page 60)

Publisher unavailable

From the song Favorite Waste of Time by Owen Paul

You’re my favorite waste of time (page 229)

BMG Rights management USA

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1

Tuesday

I have been lying here wondering what to do. Or rather I have been lying here wondering, as an alternative to doing anything at all. I turn my head slightly to the left, my alarm clock creeps slowly into more definite focus, and the hands on its face point ineluctably – both of them – to exactly ten. That is, it registers the time as ten minutes to ten a.m. And it’s still ticking. Which means that it did not accidentally cease at ten to ten last night (I like the word ‘ineluctable’ incidentally, it’s one of these words which obliges even some people who fancy themselves as educated to reach for the proverbial dictionary) (why proverbial?) No, to come back to the clock, faithfully carrying out its duties just about a foot or so away from my left eardrum, the daylight, the general tenor and orchestration of noises beyond the window (which I can still hear clearly, even though the window is tight shut – the wooden frame proof against my most determined efforts), the feeling of satedness, as if I have cleaned out of my system every last speck of sleep, all go to substantiate its unspoken but insinuating claim to be recording the correct time. In one sense I can hardly believe it. It seems too good to be true. I have been reprieved. I am free! Hooray! Yet the very temptation of congratulation causes a distasteful, impure liquid to seep through my entire body. I feel like a child who has been sent to the headmaster’s study but instead has sought refuge in the broom cupboard. The victory is an ephemeral illusion.

I want to be serious, not facetious, because I don’t really feel facetious about this thing at all. I suppose I am trying to cheer myself up. It’s sort of defiance, this pedantic, supercilious style of writing (there I go again, demonstrating my familiarity with the contents of Roget’s Thesaurus – which ought to have become extinct long ago, along with all the other sauruses – or sauri rather. I hate pedantry. Along with artificial aids to artistic inspiration, per se.) As I was saying, I want to prove that I can be serious on sheets of paper, and get down to the gnitty gritty (it looks better with a ‘g’ in front of it – well, I think so). Be quiet. Let’s be serious. Make definite philosophically valid statements.

I think the reason that I failed to turn up – well, it was cowardice. Let’s not beat about the bush. It was fucking cowardice. I was afraid. Now I feel really lousy, like a malingerer, canvassing and receiving false sympathy which I do not deserve. I feel as though I have been mistaken for an eminent personage and been accorded honour and admiration to which I have no right. Every comfortable and satisfying movement of my body elicits waves of revulsion. I feel afraid, as though I might be found out any moment and be required to justify my imposture, so that an interminable monologue of excuses, arguments and explanations has been hurtling through my mind at breakneck speed ever since I became fully and irrevocably awake. Now, that I have got to the point of admitting that it is cowardice, I feel relieved, in a way. Although it doesn’t do me the least bit of good. It doesn’t solve the problem. I mean, I do feel good, excited, in a sort of suspense of intrigue, although this feeling is besieged and isolated by surrounding armies of more realistic feelings that I will have to surrender to by and by. When I finally get up, exposed and encircled by my environment and realise just what a hopeless predicament I am in.

I mean, for instance, what should I tell them? The obvious excuse is that I am ill. But what of tomorrow, and the next day, doctor’s certificates and all that? The fact is I don’t really have any excuse at all. I look towards the future and feel myself to be slowly exploding outwards, diffusing like so much gas in a vacuum. The only way I can be contained is to be exonerated, but really this cannot happen because I have failed, I did not go through with it, and any pretence at understanding or forgiveness would be a sham. I would not allow it. It would be the very worst sort of dishonesty. The fact is that I am a coward. But I can’t live with that! If I feign illness or pretend some other pretext, that will make the situation worse, because I should be adding deceit to simple craven-heartedness. Really and truly I am worthless. Yes, I am worthless. I have done this twice now, flunked out of first university and now this. Now there is no reprieve. A second chance (for what it was worth) but no third chance – the world has already passed that could offer me any ready-made foothold. Now I am truly cast out. Everything that happens to me from now on, no matter how appalling, I shall deserve. I can expect nothing from life, no chance bonus or accidental good fortune. I wouldn’t want any such thing, in fact. I should reject it, brush it aside. For what right has anyone in my position to expect or even hope for a third chance? And yet there is an irrepressible, arrogant, presumptuous little so-and-so inside me always wishing for things. How to kill him off? Oh, I wish I could do so! Then I should really come down to reality. Perhaps this event will cause the crisis to occur – will be really beneficial, a blessing in disguise.

I feel good about this conclusion, my self is rescued, just as it is about to go under. But I check this sense of recovery because it now appears to me that I am getting everything out of proportion. After all, a day away is nothing. I can always go tomorrow. But this thought descends like a black, clammy shadow over my mind: the problem, the anxiety, the terror, the desperate compulsion to retreat all over again. I must go through with it – force myself – You’ll get over it, one day in the classroom and you’ll feel much more able to cope. The first day is the worst. You get into the swing of it in no time, and then you’ll be so glad that you did it, that you faced the challenge instead of running away from it…etcetera, etcetera. But already I feel myself turning off this path. I see the ship, overboard of which I have jumped, receding. Somehow I have got away with it. Got away with not going (again the corrosive, delicate sensation of shame in my breast). Now the determination to force myself has been weakened, like a coupling, which, once forced open, is much weaker and more likely to sever. I feel so safe, reclining here in bed, gazing at the familiar furnishings of my bedsitter. Here I can think, I am impregnable, unmolested. As long as no-one knows, and they don’t know yet – they are no doubt assuming I am ill, or perhaps I have had an accident, or lost my way – Probably he’ll turn up sooner or later, the head teacher is saying. But there isn’t much time. I have only a few hours to think this out.

I could go now, of course! The thought suddenly strikes me and I sit bold upright, rigid. But my heart sinks. No, I tell myself, decisions are not made impulsively, on the spur of the moment. The situation has to be thought out methodically, through to the end (I have a mental picture of what I might do with my new-found freedom today, this evening – my spirits are revived to a small extent).

But at once – Vain folly! says that other voice.

The main question is: why am I a coward? This divides into two, (1) What is it that I am so afraid of about appearing in a classroom and attempting to teach for forty minute stretches thirty or so girls and boys? They won’t kill me, will they? (2) Why is it that I do not want to do it enough to overcome this particularly gruelling obstacle? Why can I not prevail upon myself the importance of going through with this course, when the end result would be so beneficial: I should have a career, a qualification, a position. I should become useful to society. The second question is the first question taken onto a deeper level, really. They are both inextricably connected. In other words, what makes my action irrefutably wrong – I mean my lack of action – is that my failure to attend has deprived me of the experience necessary to effectively answer the first question, and in fact to come to a rational, realistic decision as to whether I should or should not make teaching my career. Thus my failure to turn up is an absurdity, a gap in the continuity of my real life. It’s a flight from reality, based on prejudice, preconception and fear.

This conclusion only makes me feel the more wretched. My head feels as if it is being compressed in an iron mould. My heart feels tight, cased in with taut wire. Reality is in that classroom, four miles away. I am really in that classroom teaching, not lying here. This here is all happening in my imagination, within a queer loop of time, or a ‘time-warp’ as science fiction writers call it.

I suppose the reason why I am not – well, one reason – is a stupid, idiotic fear of being an authority. I don’t fear authority as such. I am happy in fact to be under an authority, I don’t mind that, but to actually be that authority, I don’t want any part of it. Not only because it is patently not me, but because fundamentally I can’t see that I have any right to tell anyone else what to do. Authorities are hated because they impose a regimen on unwilling subjects. Provided you are hard, thick-skinned enough to take the hostility engendered, then you can ‘hit back’, be the bastard they all expect you to be, play the game, in which case you win that horrible thing respect. But me – I couldn’t be an authority under any circumstances, especially an unwilling one. In that position I should suffer for my refusal to ‘play the game’, that is to say I would be humiliated, shied at, made the whipping boy, the aunt sally, just like we used to do at school with some of the teachers. As a matter of fact, why I don’t know, such teachers were almost always teachers of French.

I remember one man, whose name was Arbuthnot, who had cross-eyes, so that whenever he looked at you, he appeared to be looking in a direction ten or so degrees to the left or right – I can’t remember which. He was tall and lean and used to cycle to school on a very old, upright machine, rusty and shabby. Whenever he overtook us, as we walked to school, we used to shout, Mr. Arbuthnot, your wheels are going round. I used to join in the shout, when it became clear, after several days experience that it was not dangerous (although because of this man’s character, which we sensed almost before he walked in to take his first class, the leading lights of our form knew they could get away with it, otherwise they would never have done it, because exhibitionists and cheerleaders are always cowards at heart). Then one day, when this poor man had been teaching for a mere two or three weeks and his classes had already established themselves as self-contained riots in which we shouted, told jokes, threw chalk and ink and paper darts about and wrote rude words and messages on the blackboard behind his back as he attempted rather feebly to fight his way through the motions of teaching – one day he was cycling very tall and upright and precarious to work, like a yacht sailed by a novice through a rough sea in a strong gale – the rough sea being analogous to us swarm of boys of varying sizes and degrees of malevolence, one particularly cocky and insolent boy in my class (of whom, incidentally, I was afraid) suddenly pointed hard at his bicycle tyre and exclaimed: hey! Mr. Arbuthnot, look – great scot, Mr. Arbuthnot, you can’t ride a bicycle like that! Look at the wheel! in an ironically deprecating voice. And what did Mr. Arbuthnot do? He stopped riding, got off the bicycle and peered intently at the wheel, in doing so forfeiting finally and irrevocably the last remaining dregs of respect that we had for him. Up until then we’d regarded him as an amiable, benign curiosity, a sort of ‘kind father’ figure. But from then on there was a complete change; he was treated with utter contempt. He was almost an embarrassment. Instead of being made fun of in the classroom, he was patently ignored, almost as though he wasn’t there.

Well, the point of this long account is that I am an exactly similar sort of man. If I were to become a teacher my fate would without doubt be that of Mr. Arbuthnot’s. It would not be so much a matter of not commanding respect. I should almost deliberately invite disrespect. I should try in all ways possible to repudiate my position. Why? Because I find the business of being an authority utterly repugnant. Indeed it almost turns my gut to even think about it. Why should children come to school? Why shouldn’t they do what they want to do? I don’t want to force anyone to learn anything he or she doesn’t choose to learn. Of course they think this attitude is ‘irresponsible’, whatever they mean by this word. I’ve never been able to unravel its true meaning. It’s another of these words whose meaning has been perverted. To most people the word ‘responsibility’ means loading yourself up with other people’s problems and affairs, interfering, intruding, dominating, worrying, in order to feel a sense of superiority, or something. I don’t know.

In any case, the conclusion I cannot fail to come to is that it was senseless of me even to start this course. Why the hell did I apply in the first place? Well, I wanted to. But why? Because … Actually I feel I am getting to the point where I am going to have to admit much that is distasteful, during which I shall undergo paroxysms of revulsion even in formulating the sentences to reflect these ‘truths’ if indeed they are truths, for maybe everything is a lie, one big lie. I mean (to get back to reality, away from philosophical niceties) I can see my life open out dimly beneath me like a landscape below a layer of cloud, rather rugged and barren, inhospitable. I still cannot properly focus upon it, or descend further towards it, because I am still tied to this worry, hooked by heart and brain, preoccupied by the thought that I have erred and been a coward. I feel that as penance I should remain stretched on this bed of nails and not indulge myself by flying low over my past life, buzzing peak experiences (peaks that are ugly crags, extremely dangerous – well, not extremely – I must admit to a penchant for exaggeration). On the other hand it might do me good, it might release me. Something’s got to happen. I have to resolve this predicament and soon. If I am going to write a letter to my tutor resigning from the course… a surge of joy suffuses through me, which defies all rational rebuke, annihilates the forces of reason, such as that I shall have to pay back my whole grant – half of which has already been spent. But this joy surges up and magically effaces all my tormenting tangle of thought like penicillin clears germs from a slide. This joy tells me that I do not really, did not really ever wish to embark on this accursed course, that I never ever had the slightest desire to become a teacher, especially of schoolchildren. But what bothers me is the source of this joy, which derives directly from the alternative which has crept surreptitiously, maliciously into my mind.

Well, I’ll delay talking about that alternative for the moment, because I want to get back to my reasons for committing myself to this course. My reasons were partly those of ‘ought’ and partly those of desire. The ‘ought’ ones were incontrovertibly sensible, while the desire one was all wrong. It was quite irrelevant to the merits of the course itself, or to the suitability for me of teaching as a career, and indeed hopelessly unconnected to my life as it really was or is. In fact so ashamed of it am I that I can hardly bear to record it.

It maybe that I should not feel ashamed of myself. But I do, and for very good reasons too. I wouldn’t feel any shame at all if I were a normal, well-balanced person. But the fact is I’m not. I’m sick. I know I’m sick. It disgusts me to even say it, my right hand is at this moment tingling with self-conscious revulsion. I’ve no right to say that I’m sick. I shouldn’t be. And I don’t want to be. I desperately want to be normal, to be able to be open about my motives and be accepted as such by ordinary people. In a word, I want self-respect. But how could someone like me possibly have any self-respect, in the light of what lies within me, which I always have to keep covered up and concealed, because if people knew what grows and festers inside me, they would … well, I don’t know what they would do, but it would be quite horrific. To put it in a nutshell, what I suffer from is immaturity, pathological immaturity. I know that people won’t have any sympathy with this. But it’s true. Here are some examples of what I mean.

I have a morbid predilection for anything decadent, degenerate, destructive. Incidents of people abandoning themselves to habits which are quite positively harmful, wallowing in muck and filth, letting themselves go to seed, deliberately indulging in immoral behaviour just for the sake of it – this sort of behaviour fascinates me, because there is about it something so beautifully sensuous and free. Though it disgusts me to the point of wanting to beat, to torture and immolate myself as retribution to admit it, I am especially fascinated, almost you could say intoxicated when women indulge in decadent, self-corrupting behaviour. For instance, to take a very mundane example, I love to watch very young girls smoke, the younger, prettier, more fresh-complexioned and innocent the better. There is something supremely ecstatic, especially nourishing to my inner senses and imagination to go into certain cafes and watch all the schoolgirls trooping in with impudent expressions on their faces, sitting down and lighting up. I watch carefully to make sure they inhale, and then try to gauge, to speculate by their manner of doing so the extent of their dependence on cigarettes. It is beautiful, quite delicious for me to imagine little girls of twelve whose breasts are hardly formed, thin, fragile creatures within loose, casually fitting clothes, smoking thirty or forty cigarettes a day – the contrast between those warm, tame, naïve bodies, slender and undeveloped, and the lungs hidden from view, but actually blackened and clogged with nicotine and tar – oh! The very thought of it is exquisite! Yet how could I possibly reveal this to anyone? The effect would be AWFUL. But what is even more to the point – WHY? Why do I have such vile, disgraceful fantasies? I mean any girl whom I pass on the street who is wearing tatty, worn, faded – but especially dirty clothes – jeans smeared with grime, greasy hair, sloppy, floppy, grubby tee-shirt that looks as if it has been rudely torn from a piece of old curtain found by the roadside, turns my head at once. I gaze at her in a rapture of fascination until she is out of sight. And I want her. The more good-looking she is, the more painful is it for me to watch her go away.

I have thought about this long and hard. My guilt has forced me to analyse it. To begin with it is totally indefensible, on account of being quite opposed to reason. How could someone actually want to encourage people to smoke, when smoking has been proved beyond a shadow of doubt to be cause of so much disease and death. The rational approach would be to discourage people from smoking, particularly young people, who, once they contract the habit to the point of finding it impossible to give up, face a prospect of weakened, failing health and early death. I should, as a rational being like honest, clean, upright, virtuous girls whose sense of right and wrong is highly developed because they don’t suffer from any foolish blocks preventing them from clearly appreciating what is the most obvious, sane and sensible way to behave. Whereas I hate such people, I loathe and detest them, and the hate rises in me like hot vapour whenever I contemplate their existence, their irreproachable ways and inviolable standards. It is clear that I like evil, I like sickness, trouble, havoc, turmoil, misery, tragedy. I like people to sell themselves, to deface their consciences, to scrawl upon the white sheet of innocence, to smear and besmirch it. Anything beautiful, but in a sanctified, irreproachable, incorruptible sense I want to destroy. Every time I see a nun, I want to tear the habit off her and rub her body in filth. I hate sacrifice, especially for noble causes, I despise moral restraint, forbearance, the idea of ‘curbing the baser instincts’. I want to let the baser instincts run riot. I love to hear and read stories about people who allowed total free-reign to their impulses, who lived from moment to moment, who flouted and violated all the normal, accepted standards of morality and behaviour. For instance Janis Joplin. Reading the story of her life gave me a tremendous feeling of joy, I was celebrating secretly every time she took a further step towards self-destruction. And another thing. Very often when I am walking down a street, or travelling in a car, or hitch-hiking on a busy arterial road with fast convoys of traffic, I find myself hoping for an accident – a really major one – a multiple pile-up with burnt-out wrecks of cars scattered about the highway or smashed against houses or trees. I really do!

This brings me to the second point, for it is obvious that I would not want to be involved in the accident myself. Therefore it is clear that I am a mere voyeur of evil, of decadence, of destruction. To substantiate the statement, I have never ever in my whole life, not even momentarily given free-reign to my instincts. I am careful never to smoke more than six cigarettes a day because of the effect it may have on my health, which is something I periodically get very worried about, almost to the point of hypochondria. Further, I hate being dirty, I take a bath every day, and before going out I always douse myself extravagantly with after-shave, to counteract any body odour I might give off and which I imagine therefore would repel people who otherwise might enjoy my company. I detest being inconvenienced or put out as a consequence of anyone’s tricks, dishonesty, turpitude or negligence and wax very irritated if this happens … the list could be prolonged. But I think I have made the point: that the evil I delight in is only in the imagination – at least as far as I am concerned. I mean the evil in Janis Joplin’s life was undoubtedly very real to her but not to me. The experience of her life and death does not reach me, who am therefore quite insulated from its destructive effects. I can only romanticise it. For this reason I call my disease – for it certainly is a disease – the Romanticism of Depravity.

The question is – why do I feel the need to indulge in morbid fantasies which have no bearing whatsoever on my real life? I have no intention of giving them up. Absolutely none. I have considered this very meticulously and I think the reason is as follows: there is only one path to goodness, to moral righteousness. The Bible talks of the straight and narrow way. For this reason it is impossible to be good and be free. The two are incompatible, because freedom means being free to decide between a number of different paths and to choose a route which is one’s own path. The number of paths that lead to evil are infinite, so it stands to reason that not all of them have yet been explored, but even if they have and there is no more scope for originality (something which I value very highly – it even irks me sometimes in this account to have to use the established English vocabulary, instead of inventing totally new words), then considering evil paths as possible alternatives to the one good path at least introduces a measure of variety into one’s life, so that the future is not completely, irrevocably predetermined. Men wish more than anything else to be free. This is why there is so much wickedness and suffering in the world. Perfectly good men, some of them morally irreproachable have been obliged to seek out and set off on evil paths through the very best of intentions – that is the desire to be free. But at what cost to their consciences, to their self-respect and self-esteem! Yet they were driven to it, because the only alternative was the familiar, stale path of goodness. If men were not interested in freedom, and were quite content with total determinism, then Utopia would have been permanently established on this Earth thousands of years ago, long before the birth of Christ – and I suppose the nearest equivalent to Utopia in the contemporary world would be the Mormon community in Salt Lake City, the very thought of which makes me shudder to my very bones.

If there were only these two alternatives – to be free in evil or imprisoned in goodness – then the outlook for mankind would be bleak indeed. But happily there is a third course: it is the one I have chosen for myself and which I have already more or less explained. That is: to do good, but imagine evil. This is the main and basic principle of the Romanticism of Depravity.

There is a cost however, but within the cost is a pay-off. I have to perpetuate a neurosis, a conflict in myself. Yet it is the only way of being free without moral opprobrium. It is not a pleasant way of life by any means. And so quite often, although this sounds like an absurdity, I long to be free of being free. Sometimes I feel that my self is an intricate and complex piece of machinery with no purpose or function whatsoever. I think and think and think until I think I have understood myself completely, and yet it is all totally unproductive. The trouble, I have decided, is that, I understand myself too well. I live under the dazzling, blinding glare of an intellectual arc-lamp. What is more, in understanding myself too well, I have confirmed myself. This is in flat diametric contradiction to the principles of psychoanalysis (Freud, I’m afraid you will have to go out of the window). My mode of understanding (and what other mode is there, may I ask? – understanding is understanding and not misunderstanding) is analogous to the tightening up of nuts. Every time I concentrate on another aberration of my consciousness, a particular component or symptom of my general neurosis, I dwell upon it, bring pressure to bear on it, and unintentionally – or perhaps intentionally – give another wrench to the nut that holds it in place, clamping it more securely into position in my brain. The more I analyse and interpret these reactions and fixations, the more firmly rooted they seem to become in my behaviour pattern. It is as though I want to disprove the efficacy of analysis by defying it. Or I want to escape and discover a sanctuary even deeper beneath the ground in which to hide this ‘neurotic’ self, which another part of me, the sensible, rational self, desperately desires to get rid of.

What is this neurotic self which I want and yet don’t want to extract? Even I have lost sight of it – it has metamorphosed into the image in which I have presented it. All images are inaccurate and this one has merged into one compact mass with a shape. But in actual fact it is shapeless, an amorphous warren of autonomous tendencies, all moving in different, incompatible directions, like ants on a disturbed ant-heap – all managing to avoid one another so their contradictoriness does not become apparent. Only in the real world do my responses collide and neutralise one another. The result: paralysis.

Of course most of my understanding is out of books, which is especially galling. The more I read, the less original do my thoughts become, which is why lately I have given up reading. I want to believe that my thoughts really are my thoughts and not the half-digested regurgitations of some savant, some self-appointed, socially-approved ‘expert’, or ‘imaginative’ writer whose lucubrations happen to be in harmony with fashionable inclinations and tendencies. If they turn out to be irrational and outrageous – well, at least they are my own. If they are contradictory, at least it shows I am not conforming to a stereotype. This question of freedom involves so much. What I mean is: I am quite happy to sit in bed, in this room for the rest of today, composing this, even though outside the sun is shining and its shaft of light, beaming in from the tiny dormer window, stamps twin ingots of brilliant gold on the wallpaper just above to the left of my head (does this description have literary merit?). But if someone mysteriously crept up the stairs and locked the door, I should immediately want to escape, for no other reason than that I couldn’t. Or, to give a related example, if you endowed a man with everything he could possibly desire inside a room, he would still not be satisfied unless he was able to open the door of that room and look outside, because it is one of man’s basic instincts to transcend limits. This is why we are incapable of conceptualising finitude. This may seem irrelevant to my present situation but it has a bearing on my refusal to be understood. If I am understood by myself, that is one thing, but to be understood by someone else is merely to be objectified, to be as it were locked in the room of oneself. So that one at once desires to escape, to becoming something other than what one is understood objectively to be. And yet, how can one do this? Only by a sort of pretence.

To give an opposite illustration, I sit here, writing this, knowing I should really be somewhere else. People will be asking questions, making inquiries. They will be speculating, offering hypotheses, or even scratching their heads, baffled. They may finally come up with the correct solution – that I am a coward. I shall be condemned, despised, without a chance to defend myself, because the real reason, the alibi, the extenuating circumstances which could reprieve me, restore my reputation cannot be made public. Because the moment it was it would cease to be real. So I have to take the retribution, meekly, without protest, because it is ‘just’ in the sense that it is ‘unjust’. I bear it because I know I don’t deserve any sympathy. On the contrary, I deserve to be crushed. The reason I deserve to be crushed is that I have suffered so greatly, yet nobody realises it, nobody can possibly see it. No-one can ever understand the exact nature of the suffering that I undergo, constantly, all the time, every day of my life.

They