HOW
DO I VIEW MY FUTURE (?)
Clearly, I cannot
continue in my current tracks for ever, since my deteriorating personal
circumstances are unlikely to take a turn for the better. It is difficult enough to write now, what
with a depression that gets steadily worse, and typing I can only manage if I
take a ten-minute break every twenty or so minutes, which allows time for the
build-up of tension in my head to subside slightly [this isn't as much the case
in 2004 as it was in 1982]. Being
depressed in this way is not the same as being mad, though it would be easy for
other people to think so! The lifestyle
one is obliged to lead, with a certain number of regulated breaks, is by no
means natural, but one does at least remain in possession of one's faculties
and can thereby tell right from wrong. I
may have to take a ten-minute break between listening to one long-playing
record and another, but I can at least listen to it. I may not be able to read consistently beyond
twenty minutes, but at least I can read, if intermittently. Thus I know very well what my position is, as
also what needs to be done to remedy it.
The trouble is that knowing what needs to be done and actually being in
a financial position to do it ... are two completely different things!
My future, therefore, must be different from both my past and my
present. I don't see myself writing for
much longer, let alone for the rest of my working life, since, even given the
deteriorating state of my mental health, I have said
most of what needs to be said to effect an upgrading of religious truth in the
world over the coming decades. To a
large extent my literary task is now complete.
For I have attained to the truth to an extent unprecedented in literary
history, and can't expect to go very much beyond it. I can perhaps refine on some details in the
years ahead, but I cannot expect to radically extend the scope of my
writings. Besides, I'm not a writer in
the strict literary sense but a philosopher, propagandist, and teacher who disdains mere belle lettres. My possible destiny as a new messiah would
not enable me to fit complacently into the role of homme
de lettres, which, in any case, is a
role I personally despise. To be
disposed to scribbling out novel after dreary novel for forty-odd years ... I
would have to be a lesser man than I feel I am, since literature carried out
for no other reason than itself strikes me as a relatively inconsequential
pursuit, only suitable to a mediocre and cowardly type of man who lacks either
the courage or aptitude for a higher calling.
If I now knew that I was destined to be a writer all my life, I would
feel quite humiliated, judging such a fate unworthy of my knowledge in certain
other matters!
No, for me, writing is simply a means to an end, a task that had
to be embraced in order that I could discover the truth about God, religion,
politics, society, etc., and then set about the higher task of getting that
truth implemented. I may not have viewed
it like that at the beginning, but its subsequent development leaves me with
little or no choice in the matter, since what I say could never be countenanced
by the bourgeois establishment. Thus, if
I have no future in writing, I may at least have one in politics which, if
successful, could lead to the subsequent implementation of the Truth and to the
adoption, by the people, of superior criteria in religion, politics, art, etc.
But a future in politics would probably necessitate a return to
