The history of human stupidity

I traveled over to Robert’s on the bus. It was again rainy and grey, although the weather did clear a little as we approached Dearnelow. It’s not a very pleasant place: the bus station was filled to overflowing with nightmarish people shouting at one another and clutching their bulging bags. This is the side of Christmas that nauseates me.

I’ve bought all my presents save for Mum’s, books mainly – I bought Dad a biography of Christina Rossetti and a copy of The Easterby Remembrancer and an 1891 edition of the Life and Teachings of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Buddhism for Rob and Carol. I bought myself a 1956 edition of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. I couldn’t stand the crowds any longer so I caught the bus to Saxton.

When I got to Saxton, Carol was ill in bed with an upset stomach and Rob sat on the sofa before the crackling flames of the fire reading The History of Human Stupidity. The evening slipped away pleasantly enough, with nothing to do but read Wilson’s The New Existentialism, which is fascinating.

Carol rose from her sick bed looking white and obviously ill and spent the evening half asleep on the sofa. I listened to some ‘spiny classics’ on Radio 3: Connolly, from the sixties, a piece for brass quintet, another piece for male, female voices only, and an orchestral composition, limited in tonal range and interest, a seeming chaotic maelstrom of notes and lone noises in the emptiness: the music of vastation and despair, of inward turning, of blind frustration.

Robert told me he fears the age and the sickness we live in, recounting tales about an epidemic of glue sniffing at his school and an eleven-year old girl with a painted face and in a mini-skirt and lipstick, asking him if he fancied her. This shocked him. His Buddhist faith doesn’t seem to help him find contentment. Perhaps he’s striving in that direction, but at the moment his mind seems only saddened and full of despair at the things he sees around him.

“It is true that reality exists apart from us; but what we mistake for the world is actually a world constituted by us, selected from an infinitely complex reality . . .” MY world is not THE world.

Although I attach to it a tragic, despairing quality, in truth it possesses no qualities at all. It exists and I exist, and the world I make for myself from the one around me is filtered and distorted by my own consciousness. I intentionalise my perceptions of the world. The twentieth century has witnessed the “slow poisoning” of religion by science and the edifice of faith has crumbled away leaving a black void. The age of Nihilism is upon us and no one recognizes it.

Is a part of us responding to this great tide of Nothing?

This morning Mum went on at me: “You let yourself and me down by dressing as you do. You don’t do yourself justice . . . you’re a good-looking lad . . . If you thought anything of me you’d accord with my feelings.”

Why must I conform to their ideal of Perfect Youth? They don’t seem to respect my wishes in this.