Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children; even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.
I refer to the restaurant—and here I am guessing. But imagine the confidence, the civility required for people first to come to a strange table, possibly in a shady courtyard in Loyang, and to sit down with others whom they do not know, or only remotely know, without fear of being attacked or stabbed. An unknown chef then serves food, which they eat without fear that it may be poisoned. It’s a revolution! The restaurant opens a new era in social relationships. In those remarkable circumstances, one not only eats, one converses. And from conversation new ideas are born.
In China and now in the west, cuisine is a fine art, while in other parts of the world millions starve. Is this unfair? Of course. And what is unfair is often beyond remedy, in continents as in families. We have trouble grasping this simple truth, and invent gods and economics and trade practices to try to disguise it.
"It's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. I wish I believed, as J. B. Priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. Three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. Perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! A "bad night" is not always a bad thing."
Books by and about Brian W. Aldiss
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