XX

I can't believe what I wrote before. My emotional conviction is that I have wasted my life so far, but I don't believe that I can do nothing but acquiesce in decay.

All I want to do is write stories that deal with my own affective hollowness and hopelessness of love, about my own experiences of amorous failure, and of finding such overwhelming satiety in unexpected phenomena of such monumental beauty, that all other concerns are washed away.

I think my love life has been so unsuccesful because I'm a romantic, of the old school - Sublimity is what I need. There is no such thing as true love between Romantics, only confluence of a cataclysmically sublime experience.

I think I would have done better to be born a gentlewoman whose literary* parents indulged her passion from and early age, and to have eloped with some poets to Switzerland, thence to partake of Laudanum and set down the strange phantasies that came to me, as if in a dream, but with every solidity of physical apprehension...

*feminist mum, of course