43

I sat in my dressing gown eating breakfast.

Happiness was contentment with symbols. But when one knew a split between symbols and reality one was in trouble. I must try to get back to being content. After all, I was in the same condition as many others. I could handle symbols but I could not touch reality. Most human beings were fetishists. They had to believe that money was wealth and that words were thought and that mind was God. If one was not content to be a fetishist, one went mad. I must try to be content. The sticking-plaster forced me to sit down when I used the lavatory. I was cunning at imitating­.

But there was only one truth, and that was being a real woman. Men were branches from the tree. Women were the stuff of the central trunk.

Before I could paint the walls of the room pearl-grey I would first have to get the wallpaper off. Perhaps my landlady, Mrs Cartwright, would not want the walls painted pearl-grey. And she might not like the pink ceiling. She would come for the rent at the end of the month. Time was getting into gear again. Time could go on even though it was not divided into sections by Frank’s visits. As long as something was hap­pening somewhere, there was time. Once I had believed that time was taking me forward to happiness. Now it was eating into my money and making me older. Time might be taking me forward to a place where I would be middle-aged. But I must kill myself rather than be a middle-aged man. I would not be able to live in the body of a middle-aged man. My mind would go out of my body and cling to the pink ceiling. The body could be taken away and put in a mental hospital, but the mind would remain in this room clinging to the ceiling.