Turtle Diary

I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn’t seen hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind.

A turtle doesn't have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on. Maybe that's why man kills everything: envy.

Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. Too-lateness is potentially every moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it's no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it's time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now.

When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he'd got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keat's Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhere here, I'm not yet ready to take them out and look at them again.

A frightening thought had been growing in me. I'd always assumed that I was the central character in my own story but now it occurred to me that I might in fact be only a minor character in someone else's.

It was the sort of situation that would be ever so charming and warmly human in a film with Peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith but that sort of film is only charming because they leave out so many details, and real life is all the details they leave out.

Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it like Ahab with the White Whale. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone. Even in matriarchal societies I doubt that there were ever female Beowulfs. Women lie with gods and demons but they don’t go looking for monsters to fight with. Ariadne gave Theseus a clew but the Minotaur was his business.

I had a salad. If I were to say that today's tomatoes were an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes.

There must be a lot of people in the world being wondered about by people who don't see them any more.

Sometimes I think that this whole thing, this whole business of a world that keeps waking itself up and bothering to go on every day, is necessary only as a manifestation of the intolerable. The intolerable is like H.G. Wells's invisible man, it has to put on clothes in order to be seen. So it dresses itself up in a world. Possibly it looks in a mirror but my imagination doesn't go that far.

Am I doomed? Flashing darkness is pretty much the same as flashing light really. Fear isn’t at all the same as courage but after a certain point perhaps being afraid of everything is the same as being afraid of nothing.

I was on South Bank one day by the Royal Festival Hall. It was a sunny day with a bright blue sky. I was looking up at a train crossing the Hungerford Bridge. Through the train I could see the sky successively framed by each window as the carriage passed. Each window moving quickly forward and away held briefly a rectangle of blue. The windows passing, the blue remained.

People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don’t think it’s for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’ Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: ‘This is not a world, this is nothing, there’s no way to live at all.

How do you stay cheerful?’ I said. ‘I don’t mind being alive,’ he said.

Shamans wear bird costumes and they fly. Somehow they experience flying.

Time's arrow points one way only. Even the moment just past cannot be returned to.

It may happen to me at any time that everything will be just what it is, with no stories in anything.

I've seen a film in which Dr Lorenz pointed out the difference between two colonies of cattle egrets, one free and one caged. The free ones, who had to provide for themselves, were monogamous and energetic and kept their numbers within ecologically reasonable limits. The captive egrets were promiscuous, idle, overbreeding and presumably going to hell fast.

But more and more I think that madness is the world's natural condition and to expect anything else is madness compounded.

I'd always assumed that I was the central character in my own story. Now it occurred to me that I might, in fact, be only a minor character in someone else's.... And I didn't even know the story.

Then I thought, what if there were a stone with my name on it? Then I thought, what if my name were on every stone? Then: the name of every stone is in me. I can't say the name of every stone but it is in me.

My father did, I think. Commit suicide. Although they called it an accident. His car went over a cliff into the sea. On to some rocks that you can see at low tide but not high water. No collision, no skid marks or anything. My mother kept the newspaper cutting, I still have it somewhere. Who knows what might have appeared in the road coming towards him. The rest of his life maybe.

And I knew she was going to ask me some kind of direct question and I was going to answer it and then we'd both be in it, would be ever so charming and warmly human in a film with peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith but that sort of film is only charming because they leave out so many details, and real life is all the details they leave out.

And in writing, they have conjured you, like Shackleton’s third man, so that you can bring to their loneliness your own, and let it stop along with theirs.

They won’t stop killing the whales. They make dog- and cat-food out of them, face creams, lipstick. They kill the whales to feed the dogs so the dogs can shit on the pavement and the people can walk in it.

When I was a child grown-ups often told me to smile, which I found presumptuous of them. People still tell me that sometimes, mostly idiots at parties.

Three-hundred-pound turtles navigate the ocean and come ashore to be slaughtered for the five pounds of cartilage that gets sold to the soup-makers.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

That trains mostly stay on rails, that the streets are mostly peaceful, that the square continues green and quiet below my window is more than I have any right to expect, and it happens every day.

His eyes look as if he's pawned his real ones and is wearing paste.