Also, the image of William Blake was somehow ghostlily conceptually entwined in Nelson’s idea of what he was doing — Blake the defender of the essence of England against the traducers who were turning it into mere empire.

Anyway, the sight of Harold sitting down again like Canute on his throne and looking around for me to explain to him what on earth was now going to happen was too much for me, and I fled.

Ultimately it was my continuing silence that got Denoon to realize he had to perorate.

his Uncle Niall had been working as a courier for the IRA. So he had been functioning as a shuffling old murderous factotum well into the sixties or even later

He said that there was actually one writing project that if carried out successfully would be enough to justify anyone’s life. That would be a convincing essay against violence, against participating in official violence, ever. He had the noumenal form of the essay.

The text was always pallid and weak compared to what he knew and felt, which was the proof that he lacked the genius to externalize himself on this issue.

Meanwhile the issue of the night men was turning crescive without my noticing.

I don’t know if this was deliberate protean behavior à la cornered jackrabbits or if it was simply adventitious.

When I left the U.S. for Africa he was probably about even with Ivan Illich on the clerisy’s fame meter. The clerisy is a word I got from Nelson which turns out to be indispensable, like others of his.

the dictator of the bantustan across the border that would someday like to engulf Botswana because they’re all Tswana after all, and there are five million of them under Mangope and only one million in Botswana. The Boers love Mangope’s irredentism and keep it pumped up.