20-21/01/13

The four twentieth-century authors whose books I have read and enjoyed (respected, admired, etc.) the most are Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, Henry Miller, and Jean-Paul Sartre, all of whom were to influence me as a writer/thinker and set me on the path to literary success, that is to say, to a literary vocation in which the pursuit of Truth, or metaphysical truth, was the principal motivation. No money, no fame, no recognition, no encouragement – how could there be? But success on my own terms, that is good enough for me!

If I reluctantly entered upon the path to a literary vocation, as I did, it was because I saw myself as a musician who only took up writing when all else, including the loss of a piano when I moved address from Merstham in Surrey to Finsbury Park in north London in 1974 and the want of an electric guitar (I still owned a battered old acoustic one, but so what?), had failed. Subsequently, any music I played or 'composed' (ahem!) was an aside to my pursuit of a literary vocation, to which, through thick and thin (but mostly thin) I have remained steadfast.

Superficiality is a bitch vulgarly imposing and insinuating without just cause, driven by vacuous necessity.

People – and males in particular - seek and strive for one thing above all: independence of other people, especially of their exploitations and insinuations.

As one of the world's leading philosophers I feel I have a right to live above the world in this attic flat whose rear window overlooks Alexandra Palace from above and from a discreet distance that renders it of somewhat diminished scale.

Is that an angel on the pinnacle of the pediment or, perhaps, a whore? I should prefer to think it was an angel, since, in my celibacy and solitude, I am of saintly disposition and prefer to look down upon such creatures from a higher vantage-point, but, deep down, I am not convinced. After all, would not whore hyped as angel accord with the general biblical practice of hyping Devil the Mother as God the Father or the Cosmos as the Universe or, for that matter, metachemistry as metaphysics?

Ultimately, the only thing worth knowing is oneself or, more specifically, one's self. Otherwise how, as a male, can one carry on living? To be at the mercy of other people, particularly females, with their so-called selflessness, is a form of hell that limits and corrupts one's life, making one a kind of dependent nonentity subject to constraints upon self-knowledge.

The relatively short move – within walking distance – from Hornsey to Harringay was, for me, akin to moving from Hell to Heaven, though only in comparative terms. For here, as elsewhere, there are still neighbours to contend with, most of whom are not adult male.

If I write less and less, it must be because I think more and more. As for speaking and reading, I rarely do either!

Meine Wohnung ist hell. Translated into English, that means 'my flat is bright'. Not hellish in the English sense of excruciatingly painful or evil or difficult to endure on account of the suffering involved.