[...] The demonstration was not at all like the orderly political demonstrations of the communist party in the old days; or like a Labour Party meeting. No, it was fluid, experimental-people were doing things without knowing why. The stream of young people had flowed down the street to the headquarters like water. No one directed or controlled them. Then the flood of people around the building, shouting slogans almost tentatively, as if listening to hear how they would sound. Then the arrival of the police. And the police were hesitant and tentative too. They didn't know what to expect. Anna, standing to one side, had watched: under the restless, fluid movement of people and police was an inner pattern or motif. About a dozen or twenty young men, all with the same look on their faces-a set, stern, dedicated look, were moving in such a way as to deliberately taunt and provoke the police. They would rush past a policeman, or up to him, so close that a helmet was tipped forward or an arm jogged, apparently accidentally. They would dodge off, then come back. The policemen were watching this group of young men. One by one, they were arrested; because they were behaving in such a way that they would have to be arrested. And at the moment of arrest each face wore a look of satisfaction, of achievement. There was a moment of private struggle-the policeman using as much brutality as he dared; and on his face a sudden look of cruelty.

Saw in the review of a book recently: 'One of those unfortunate affairs-women, even the nicest of them, tend to fall in love with men quite unworthy of them.' This review, of course, written by a man. The truth is that when 'nice women' fall in love with 'unworthy men' it is always either because these men have 'named' them, or because they have an ambiguous uncreated quality impossible to the 'good' or 'nice' men. The normal, the good men, are finished and completed and without potentialities. The story to be about my friend Annie in Central Africa, a 'nice woman' married to a 'nice man.' He was a civil servant, solid, responsible, and he wrote bad poetry in secret. She fell in love with a hard-drinking womanising miner. Not an organised miner, the manager, or clerk, or owner. He moved from small mine to small mine that were always precarious, on the point of making a fortune or of failing. He left a mine when it failed or was sold to a big combine. I was with the two of them one evening. He was just in from some mine in the bush three hundred miles off. There she was, rather fat, flushed, a pretty girl buried in a matron. He looked over at her and said: 'Annie, you were born to be the wife of a pirate.' I remember how we laughed, because it was ludicrous, pirates in that suburban little room in the city; pirates and the nice kind husband and Annie, the good wife, so guilty because of this affair, more of the imagination than the flesh, with the roving miner. Yet I remember when he said it, how gratefully she looked at him. He drank himself to death, years later. I got a letter from her, after years of silence: 'You remember X? He died. You'll understand me-the meaning of my life has gone.' This story, translated into English terms, should be the nice suburban wife in love with a hopeless coffee-bar bum, who says he is going to write, and perhaps does, one day, but that isn't the point. This story to be written from the point of view of the entirely responsible and decent husband, unable to understand the attraction of this bum.

A woman, starved for love, meets a man rather younger than herself, younger perhaps in emotional experience than in years; or perhaps in the depth of his emotional experience. She deludes herself about the nature of the man; for him, another love affair merely.

But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only... or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything than the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences.... [...]

[...] I went to bed deciding that to fall in love with this man would be stupid. I was lying in bed examining the phrase 'in love' as if it were the name of a disease I could choose not to have.

[...] I remember thinking it was odd that his diaries ran chronologically, not all split up like mine are. I leafed through some of the earlier ones, not reading them, but getting an impression, an unending list of new places, different jobs, an endless list of girls' names. And as a thread through the diversity of place-names, women's names, details of loneliness, detachment, isolation. I sat there on his bed, trying to marry the two images, the man I knew, and the man pictured here, who is totally self-pitying, cold, calculating, emotionless. Then I remembered that when I read my notebooks I didn't recognise myself. Something strange happens when one writes about oneself. That is, one's self direct, not one's self projected. The result is cold, pitiless, judging. Or if not judging, then there's no life in it-yes, that's it, it's lifeless. I realise, in writing this, I'm back at the point in the black notebook where I wrote about Willi. If Saul said, about his diaries, or, summing his younger self up from his later self: I was a swine, the way I treated women. Or: I'm right to treat women the way I do. Or: I'm simply writing a record of what happened, I'm not making moral judgements about myself-well, whatever he said, it would be irrelevant. Because what is left out of his diaries is vitality, life, charm. 'Willi allowed his spectacles to glitter across the room and said...' 'Saul, standing four-square and solid, grinning slightly-grinning derisively at his own seducer's pose, drawled: Come'n baby, let's fuck, I like your style.' I went on reading entries, first appalled by the cold ruthlessness of them; then translating them, from knowing Saul, into life. So I found myself continually shifting mood, from anger, a woman's anger, into the delight one feels at whatever is alive, the delight of recognition.

[...] I said, as I had said before: 'Don't you think it's extraordinary that we are both people whose personalities, whatever that word may mean, are large enough to include all sorts of things, politics and literature and art, but now that we're mad everything concentrates down to one small thing, that I don't want you to go off and sleep with someone else, and that you must lie to me about it?' For a moment he was himself, thinking about this, and then he faded away or dissolved and the furtive antagonist said: 'You're not going to trap me that way, don't you think it.' [...]