Although the heart is a flame for the grieved person
It has been somewhat put out since the eventide

The Urdu, Mughal court poet Ghalib writes

We agree you will not be negligent however
We will have become dust till you are informed

With me, it’s not a case of having left undone the things I ought to have done, I’ve left undone the things I ought not to have done too.

(Untold Stories. Alan Bennett. Faber & Faber, 2005).

I did not pursue what never came for 30 years. So that now I have stopped pursuing the thing that will not come. I am a mere mortal and can only try to follow the patience of prophets. I doubt I can emulate it. My life is wasted upon me. My sister recently phoned me on my birthday (which I do not celebrate) and when she asked my age and I confirmed it she said “What a waste!” There is an old Chinese proverb ‘ If you want to be happy for a short time; get drunk. Happy for a long time; fall in love. Happy for ever, take up gardening.’ I am one of those on whom the Muses have sprinkled their gifts no more. I wasted away my life reading and writing, doing nothing else, ever, zombie-like! My life-blood sucked out by books got me here which is nowhere. As Rumi says ‘He that brought me here can take me out of it.’

I can only suppose that somewhere along the line my mirrors are distorted as I do not witness it in my own life. I do not enter this decade with any dreams or ambitious illusions. I have long forgot what it is to desire something. If time has not wiped me out by the end of what is just another Low Dishonest decade in which I will still read books, watch films, attend poetry sessions occasionally. People will still say the same things about me, it will still be raining. Nothing ever happens here – As Alan Bennett said ‘Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.’ At least, I know that mine is. And that which happens to other people. And there is the Larkin line ‘Something like nothing, happens anywhere.’ Today I am back where I was in 2000, snobbish, selfish, whatever else I am labelled, none the richer and none the wiser. I tend to the neorealist view of history being cyclical. A continual movement, as Antoine Lavoisier said ‘Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme.’