A typical example of an occasion when there is not a single idea on view on the vast inner horizon. I am using up pages of my notebook, minutes when I might be strolling on the beach smelling the sea, in scribbling these absurd excuses, inventing alibis for not living, trying to find one more reason why I should feel justified in keeping these nonsensical journals year after year. Year after year, and life does not last forever, not even an unsatisfactory one like mine. Perhaps this is the very thing which is keeping my life so unsatisfactory. If I could argue myself into stopping it all, even into destroying the notebooks, would it be better? Yes. Each minute would be complete in itself, like a room with four walls in which one can stand, sit, move about. Each day would be like a complete city shining in the sun, with its streets, parks and crowds. And the years would be whole countries to roam in. That much is certain. But the whole? That is to say, the interstices in time, the tiny chinks in consciousness when the total is there, enveloping one, and one knows that life is not made up of time any more than the world is made of space. They would still occur, and they would be illicit because there would have been no arrangements made for them. What a man can distil and excrete will necessarily have some value for him (if only for him, in my case) because its essence is of the interstices in time. One more justification, as idiotic as all the others, of the need for living an unsatisfactory life.
It seems to me that if one could accept existence as it is, partake of it fully, the world could be magical.
Paul Bowles, 'If I Should Open My Mouth'
