This is not a loss, at any rate not for me, I don't get anything out of socializing anyway. I never say what I really think, what I really mean, but always more or less agree with whomever I am talking to at the time, pretend that what they say is of interest to me, except when I am drinking, in which case more often than not I go too far the other way, and wake up to the fear of having overstepped the mark. This has become more pronounced over the years and can last now for weeks. When I drink I also have blackouts and completely lose control of my actions, which are generally desperate and stupid, but also on occasion desperate and dangerous. That is why I no longer drink. I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me. This is what must have engraved itself in my face, this is what must have made it so stiff and masklike and almost impossible to associate with myself whenever I happen to catch a glimpse of it in a shop window.

Το ότι συγχρόνως υπήρχε και κάτι ουσιαστικά γελοίο σ' αυτό που συνέβαινε, δηλαδή ένα πλήθος από άντρες που κάθονταν με κατεβασμένα τα βρακιά ως τα γόνατα, ο καθένας στο θάλαμό του, βογκώντας και μουγκρίζοντας και τραβώντας το πέος τους πάνω κάτω, ενώ έβλεπαν ταινίες με γυναίκες που κάνανε σεξ με άλογα ή με σκυλιά, ή άντρες με πλήθος άλλους άντρες, δεν μπορούσαν να μην το βλέπουν, αλλά ούτε και να το λάβουνε υπόψη τους, καθότι ο γνήσιος πόθος και το γνήσιο γέλιο είναι ασυμβίβαστα πράγματα, κι αυτό που τους οδηγούσε εκεί ήταν ο πόθος. Όμως, γιατί ειδικά εκεί; Όλες οι ταινίες που μπορούσες να δεις εκεί, υπήρχαν και στο ίντερνετ και μπορούσες να τις δεις τελείως μόνος, χωρίς κίνδυνο να σε δουν άλλοι. Οπότε λοιπόν έπρεπε να υπάρχει κάτι σ' αυτήν την ανομολόγητη κατάσταση που έψαχναν να βιώσουν. Ήταν το ανήθικο, αναξιοπρεπές και βρώμικο της όλης υπόθεσης ή το κλειστό από όλους τους άλλους".

I had always liked staying the night with other families, having your own room with a freshly made bed, full of unfamiliar objects, with a towel and a washcloth nicely laid out, and from there straight into the heart of family life, despite there always being, no matter whom I visited, an uncomfortable side, because even though people always try to keep existing tensions in the background whenever guests are present, the tensions are still noticeable, and you can never know if it is your presence that has caused them or whether they are just there and indeed your presence is helping to suppress them. A third possibility is, of course, that all these tensions were just tensions that lived their own lives in my head.

And it's a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.

Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest
of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life.

The sun rose in my life. At first, as dawn breaking on the horizon, almost as if to say, this is where you have to look. Then came the first rays of sunshine, everything became clearer, lighter, more alive, and I became happier and happier, and then it hung in the sky of my life and shone and shone and shone.