Christopher and His Kind

The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.

Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.

Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be so romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them.

(…) there was terror in the Berlin air – the terror felt by many people with good reason – and Christopher found himself affected by it. Perhaps he was also affected by his own fantasies. He had always posed a little to his friends in England as an embattled fighter against the Nazis and some of them had encouraged him jokingly to do so. “Don’t get killed before I come,” Edward Upward had written, “I’ll see you unless you’ve been shot by Hitler.” Now Christopher began to have mild hallucinations. He fancied that he heard heavy wagons drawing up before the house, in the middle of the night. He suddenly detected swastika patterns in the wallpaper. He convinced hinself that everything in his room, whatever its superficial color, was basically brown, Nazi brown.

It was as crude as his drafts always were. But it accomplished the enormous feat of making this shapeless blob of potential material emerge ‘out of the everywhere into here.

For Christopher, the Cosy Corner was now no longer the mysterious temple of initiation in which he had met Bubi; Berlin was no longer the fantasy city in which their affair had taken place. Their affair had been essentially a private performance which could only continue as long as Wystan was present to be its audience. Now the performance was over. Berlin had become a real city and the Cosy Corner a real bar. He didn’t for one moment regret this. For now his adventures here were real, too; less magical but far more interesting. The

A grown man who can shed tears without embarrassment is like a yogi who has learned to expel toxic matter from his body by consciously speeding up the peristaltic rhythm. He can eliminate many of life's poisons

The gramophone keeps reiterating a statement about life with which I do not agree.

How could he possibly explain himself to these people? They wanted to learn English for show-off social reasons, or to be able to read Aldous Huxley in the original. Whereas he had learned German simply and solely to be able to talk to his sex partners. For him, the entire German language—all the way from the keep-off-the-grass signs in the park to Goethe’s stanza on the wall—was irradiated with sex. For him, the difference between a table and ein Tisch was that a table was the dining table in his mother’s house and ein Tisch was ein Tisch in the Cosy Corner. *

...I remember a rainy, depressing afternoon when she remarked 'What a pity we can't make love, there's nothing else to do,' and he agreed that it was and there wasn't.