April 12

If the conceit is true, that the most vocal homophobes are shouting down their hidden natures, what does it say about me that I so readily declare other people morons?

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With the e-book, reading is reduced to a single artefact through which the text passes like a spirit through a medium. Thus the book loses its corporeal existence and literature enters the age of ghosts.

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I read that Michel Leiris, in a book called Manhood, compared writing to bullfighting, for the courage required of the participants. This is priceless. The only thing in common between the torero and the writer is the word ‘bull’.

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Don’t be too hard on yourself. There’s a whole universe for that.

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I have a head for books and factoids, with too little space left over for life. E, on the other hand, remembers everything. She contemplates in retrospect a furrowed field, while I look back upon trees in fog.

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The aphorist must peep through cracks. To see things whole would shame us into silence.

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Do politicians speak like politicians at home? “My policy of fidelity towards you, my darling, is aspirational rather than a target...”

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If at first you don’t succeed, get a man in.

March 28

I ended it, and felt the unassuageable contrition of the gardener who finds two writhing halves of the one worm.

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Oh the irony! We achieve mass literacy and Rupert Murdoch buys all the newspapers.

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If we could reconcile ourselves, truly, to the fact that no one’s watching, what fun we might get up to.

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Even as we read we forget, and what remains to us is not essence but residuum.

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The randomness of suffering being intolerable, humanity invented malediction.

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As we grow older we slow down because we can glimpse our destination.

March 5

If a truth falls on deaf ears, does it make a sound?

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With the fall of the press and the rise of the blog, the age of the hack is passing into history. Now, pace Johnson: No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for pleasure.

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The seas are acidifying faster than at any time in 55 million years. We read this and move on. For all our computers, we cannot compute.

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If the internet had existed in Weimar Germany, the Nazis might never have taken power, as their thugs would have been too busy beating up their opponents online.

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The soil of thought is temperament.

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The failure of extraterrestrial intelligence to contact us may well be proof of its existence.

March 2

An insensitive bore is not alone in his vanity. To fear the ill-opinion of others is grossly to overestimate the space we take up in their imaginations.

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We can only hope by way of contrast that once in a while good comes from our acting with the worst intentions.

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A nag is someone who pursues us with the truth.

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After a time that might have been an afternoon and might have been a century, Lucifer ordered his minions to take down the sign. ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ was an instruction that deprived Hell of its most effective torture.

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To root out clichés is to prosecute ourselves.

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The sometime pleasure of a second glance. What I took, with an inner grumble, for litter becomes a hillside of snowdrops.

February 19

The fox and the hedgehog have their domains; but what beast represents the rest of us, who know nothing save our opinions?

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The poetic response to Schrödinger’s thought experiment is to ask: what colour is the cat?

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M’s high standards, his reticence to publish all save the best, the most durable of his writing, makes me feel like a flasher who braves the streets offering a magnifying glass to his victims.

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Sometimes a typo gets to the heart of things. Just found on a green issues blog: “Grab your coast, apocalypse watchers”.

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We declare the person fascinating who listens to us longest.

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Testosterone can make a competition out of anything. Somewhere, probably, there’s a birdwatching club whose first rule is that it mustn’t be spoken of.

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Love has one language but many dialects.

February 10

An early death is a truncated story. Thirteen years after she took her own life, I find myself wanting to catch up with S. on Facebook.

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When, in the insufficiently distant future, our snouts are plunged into SimWorld and iLove and VR sex parlours, some intrepid beard will stumble with eyes aflame upon this astounding technology: the paper codex.

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In the lost forest of Caledon, I looked up to watch a raven perform its victory spin. Such gratuitous virtuosity! It was raven celebrating raven –– as life asserts its meaning in being.

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Some birds beat the air as if it were a foe meaning to drag them down. Others seem only to flap their wings in order to keep us from getting suspicious.

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What’s blindingly obvious cannot be looked at.

February 2

Politics may require a fudge but the biosphere doesn’t do compromise. Even if you leap three-quarters of the way, you still end up in the ditch.

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When success eludes us, we learn to take comfort from the consistency of our failures.

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Our last illusions about the solidity of the world vanish when we become parents and realise that the ground we stand upon is ourselves.

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Aliens came to Earth and sought at once a meeting with its most successful species. They are still waiting for the cockroaches to speak.