Peter Handke’s notebooks, The Weight of the World. Intense pleasure at the tininess of his observations. Actually, they’re not observations so much as junctions between moments. When I read them I feel that I am not after all crazy or even weird. I feel strengthened, private, encouraged. I feel the worth of very small things. The whole cast of his mind is familiar to me.

‘Writing: safe again.’ —Peter Handke. He’s more brutal with himself than I have ever been. He inspires me to try to be more truthful in this book. It’s hard, for I am always hiding something, either from myself or from the person who may or may not, today or on some future day, read this and be inclined to think less of me.

Handke: ‘I thought of art as a parachute that would stop me from falling.’

I read through the first draft of my story and saw immediately the point at which it goes off the rails. It gave me great satisfaction to know that my critical apparatus is in working order.

It seems I am a really awful person. Pushy, aggressive, demanding, always wanting everything to be clear, worked out, resolved. Also I have bad table manners: I was the first to put out my chopsticks at Brilliant’s when the food was served. My enthusiasms, my expectation that others will follow me, lead people to do so against their will: apparently I phrase suggestions in a way that brooks no refusal. When I said ‘Let’s go to the nude beach on Sunday’, my manner made him say, ‘All right’ instead of what he really felt which was ‘Maybe’. Growing more pathetic, dismal and contemptible every minute, I tried to explain my feeling that there is a link between my ‘enthusiasms’ and the bluff that’s needed to be a writer. No, no—many writers are quite introverted. I will have to tone myself down. I couldn’t help crying. Silent sobs, with a lot of tears running out. I despised myself for giving way to a spasm of self-pity. I wish I could bawl out loud, get some voice into it and howl.

Sunset last night was like a swap card I once had of a pirate ship: torn clouds, dramatic perspective, orange, gold and green. And now a dawn sky of delicate purity, and a smell of eucalypts. Maybe a marriage can get up again and walk, after a terrible beating.

A couple passed us on the beach. We guessed they had met through a dating agency. I said the man couldn’t find a woman because he talked all the time and expected her to listen. F said the woman couldn’t find a man because she listened all the time with her head on one side and made attention-murmurs, and was ‘limp’.

In the bookshop I picked up the new Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature, a book whose existence was unknown to me. I knew I could not be represented in it because they would have had to ask my permission. I examined its index. No, I wasn’t there. I felt the world seesaw. I walked to the tram stop wretched. I am full of shit. I am crude, a beginner. People must laugh at me behind my back. I posture as a writer and at forty-two I can’t even get into the Oxford book.

He’ll be like the Russians: he’ll retreat and retreat and retreat until I freeze to death.

Clear statement: I have very strong urges (irresistible urges) towards some kind of religious or, rather, spiritual experience. This frightens me, not because the spirituality in things is so inscrutable but because I don’t know what it will do to my ordinary life arrangements, my friendships, my attitude towards my work, if I turn around and acknowledge something I privately refer to as ‘the mighty force’. It’s there behind me, and in me, all the time. It’s benevolent, it’s totally good—not morally—I mean that it only wishes me well. But I’m afraid to find out what I’ll become if I stop running away from it. It’s as if I were always swimming against a tide. How do I turn round and face it? How’s it done?