Garlands

I sat about in Barry’s room talking until four last night. He seems so secure in his Marxist convictions whereas I am all doubt and indecision. He wants to devote himself to the Revolutionary Communist Party as he can’t “think of anything that would be more worthwhile.”

I got a book on nihilism out of the library:

[Man] cannot escape the creeping process of self-disintegration, which is all too euphemistically called the history of the human mind, the process which one day will expose the sounding brass of philosophies and the tinkling cymbals of poetry and religion and with a tragic inevitability bring to light the fact that the whole history of the human mind is nothing but a journey through a field of corpses, that it consists only of graves garlanded with ideologies, but that beneath this camouflage is nothing but dung and dead bones.

But nihilism is only a self-indulgent wallowing in pointlessness and self-pity and is no answer: a capitulation to despair. I bought Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.

I’ve spent all afternoon and early evening painting a portrait based loosely on Grant; everyone thinks it’s good but I’m not keen.

Tonight Tasha, from upstairs, is doing Lifeline, she of the dark and lurid purple clothes, the ‘twenties hair style and the incredible aura of something. She dominates a room with her presence and even Pete confessed to being “overawed” the first time he met her. I think she's unbelievably sexy. I was too scared to even go into the Lifeline office, let alone fumble along in a conversation.