[...] I just kept on tapping at this ring pull and finally Terence Stone threw me out of the classroom. Very politely, of course. Terence Stone was always very polite and gracious, and still is it seems: ‘I don’t recall the incident,’ he writes, ‘but am glad to discover it was a minor emotional upset that was the cause of your agitation and it was not the case that I was boring you to tears.’ I don’t know why he takes it upon himself to use the word ‘minor’ to describe the scale and depth of my feelings, and the irony is not lost on me that the ‘minor’ element in this situation was in fact me. I was the minor and my feelings were not. They were the opposite – they were huge, major, overwhelming, more than I could stand. Why does he refer to them as ‘minor’ in this way? And why is it better that my inability to engage with the lesson was due to a minor emotional upset that was brought about by one of his colleagues fooling around with me rather than by him being a bore, which in fact he could be? Who would take any consolation from being absolved in this way? It’s probably unreasonable of me to be annoyed with Terence Stone, but then again, why would anyone presume to know the measure of somebody else’s feelings? Perhaps he is simply hoping for my sake that the whole episode was just a trifle, one that hardly made a dent on me. [...]

[...] Soon it will be Christmas again. Christmas is ridiculous. The way it is exactly the same year after year is completely ridiculous. The same decorations, the same clothes, the same songs, the same food, the same sentiments – you spend the year trying to improve your lot in one way or another and at the end of it you get walloped with all this unvarying rubbish again, it’s horrible – what a really perverse way of ending a year. It’s tedious and asinine yet everyone is trapped in it because nobody wants to let anyone else down, though if you ask anyone they’ll likely tell you they’d be very happy to spend Christmas day with five types of cheese and the curtains drawn. [...]

[...] ‘It seems to me you don’t know the first thing about love,’ it began, and I don’t know how many times I’ve written that in an email to Xavier. Over and over again we had these spats where we shot down the other’s conception of love. You don’t know what love is! – You have no idea what it means to love someone! – You have no heart! –You are a narcissist! – You are entirely unsuitable! – If you really loved me you’d stay away from me! – Love asks nothing! – You don’t know the first thing about me! – I want nothing more to do with you! – You’re insane! – You’re too much for me! – Do what you like! – No one’s ever loved you like I love you! – I must have been out of my mind! – You’re completely deluded! – Be absolutely sure you know what you’re doing! – Leave me alone! – Straighten yourself out! – Don’t call me! – Your love makes me sick! – I can’t believe we’re going through all this again! – You are not at all what I thought you were! – You’re on another planet! – Every minute spent with you has been a complete waste of my time! – You don’t listen to a word I say! – I refuse to let you ruin my life! – Where has the wonderful person I fell in love with gone! – It would be my pleasure not to see you ever again! – This is hopeless! – Go to hell! On and on. I did not finish the stupid email. It was stupid. I no longer needed to say anything high-handed or deprecatory to Xavier. What for? It was all over now. Let him have the last word. Let him have the last word. ‘I pray you won’t regret this, love.’

[...] Come on old man, walk across the room. I’m waiting for you. Kiss me. Get it over with. It’s not going to be pleasant and it’s about time we found that out. Come here and take hold of me with your old hands and your old mouth. Reach out of your obscene godforsaken darkness into my plush obscene depths and grope your way along – I’m not going anywhere. For a few moments I’ll stay perfectly still. You have sat on the wall above the lakes looking at me and we have walked up the bridleway and down the bridleway and we have stood side by side at the gate and looked across the fields and when it rained we got in close to the trees there and you come by here every afternoon as if I had nothing else in the world to do and you see nothing wrong with that. And now you must kiss me so that your error is unveiled and you encounter how far you are exactly from being able to sweep me right off my feet and I must remain absolutely still in order to feel you grasp and falter, rasp and dodder – because, after all, it’s not as if you are not a captivating man, you are a very captivating man indeed, and I must forthwith feel the failure of your kiss upon my lips, stuttering unmistakably throughout me, and you must and will feel it too. It will be a most terrible kiss, sluggish and lathery, aphotic and unsteady, forgettable – it will die within moments. A cold submerged thing, briefly spurtive, barely supported. Poor flesh, sad bone. And then it will all be over. Walk across the room now old man and kiss me – let’s put an end to this.

[...] Huysmans depicts ostentatious depravity with an attention to detail that is so exquisitely meticulous it borders somewhat discomfortingly on the poetic. His vivid prose is not graphic, it is far worse than that – it is lavish. The graphic mode aims to shock – the terrible magnetism of Huysmans’s lavish style causes one to feel poisoned. To begin with my eyes jumped all over the resplendently gruesome words haphazardly, like the snowy paws of a kitten trapped in a white-hot fire grate. I felt sick to the stomach and quite deranged, as if poisoned, yes, infected with a diabolical vision that was as compelling as it was repulsive. [...]

[...] Some months ago I touched the side of a man’s face. A man I’ve never touched in any way at all. It’s not at all warranted or appropriate for me to touch this particular man, we aren’t friends, our relationship is professional. We were talking about his origins, where his parents came from and so on, he said something about his features. I happen to like his mouth a great deal, it’s very beautiful. I didn’t say that, but my hand went to his face, there it was on the side of his face, turning his face slightly away from me so that it was now in profile, ‘You’ve a lovely profile,’ I said, something like that, I can’t remember exactly, and just as quickly my hand was no longer on his face, but it had been. It had been on his face and that’s a strange thing to know, and I’d be surprised if I ever forgot that. I don’t regret it. I don’t regret things like that. I might do the following day, and for a few days after that, that’s to say I’ll likely feel absolutely mortified and green about the gills, but then time passes soon enough and so too does my nausea and mortification. In the end I don’t care too much about getting carried away and making a fool of myself. The alternative is to die of boredom, the alternative is to be genial and pass the time, the alternative is to take a spoon to my brain and scoop it out, the alternative is to drink too much and become taciturn and twisted, the alternative is to not show up at all, and I’ve done all those things and getting carried away and making a fool of myself from time to time is, in the end, so much easier to bear.

Before that she talked for a while about America’s deep conservatism and their ongoing fear of socialism, and I told her about how the CIA, or maybe it was the FBI, funded major exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist artwork in Europe at the beginning of the Cold War in order to show intellectual Europeans that in America an individual was free to express themselves in whatever way they wanted to, whereas in Russia an artist was basically producing propaganda for the Communist regime. It annoyed me that I’d said ‘the CIA, or maybe it was the FBI,’ because really I knew very well it was the CIA, the FBI handle domestic affairs, obviously, and don’t get involved with that sort of thing and I don’t know why I mentioned them, now it sounded like I didn’t know what I was talking about. You can’t say to someone ‘the CIA, or maybe it was the FBI,’ and expect them to take you seriously. [...]