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940d1a9
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My months in the Scrubs were a kind of desert in time: beyond their strict and ascetic routines they were featureless, and it is hard in retrospect to know what one did on any day or even in any month. I had had, of course, some experience of deserts, even a taste for them, and knew how to fall back, like a camel on its fat, on an inner reserve of fantasy and contemplation.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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9a45ec7
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the music expressed life and explained it and left you having to ask again.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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7cd9190
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It is hard to do justice to old pleasures that cannot be revived--we seem half to disown our youthful selves, who loved and treasured them.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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cb4707e
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I'm not sure what form I expected the threat to take; a police car actually stopping outside, a powerfully built black man darting up the drive? I had several dreams of siege, in which the house became a frail slatted box, shadowy and exquisite within, the walls all cracked and bleached louvres which fell to powder as one brushed against them. In one dream Arthur and I were there, and others, old school friends, a gaggle of black kids from ..
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sleep
murder
gay
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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3c673ab
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Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to. Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made. The stupidity and the resentment were dreadful at times. But..
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sex
love
language
resentment
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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496fa0e
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Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk.
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dusk
gay
london
city
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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fc61c08
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There is a thumping silence, and the light of the one lamp across the wet tiled floor seems conscious that it will illuminate this and many other atrocities, just as it will go on shining through days and months of sudden speechless lusts, and all the intervening hours of silent emptiness.
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bathroom
lamp
gay
police
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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1997e0c
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I haunted and interrogated the past even as it interrogated me. London, Skinner's Lane, Brook Street, the Sudan - how had we passed all that time? Why did we not burn up every moment of it, as we would if we could have it all again? The journey back to England surfaced in dreams and occupied my days, the train to Wadi Halfa panting across the desert, reading old newspapers in the white, shuttered carriages while Taha, alas, was obliged to t..
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loss
memory
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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83d7abd
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Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been.
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train
london
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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c010a06
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It had come down in the storms several winters ago and he had watched it sink over time on the shattered branches beneath it, like a great gnarled monster protractedly lying down, bedding down in its own rot and wreckage.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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46445a6
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She didn't know what Senta was saying, beyond the recurrent sounding of the word Mann, but she sensed the presence of passionate love, and felt the air of legend, which had a natural hold on her.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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4d64362
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In truth the memoir was a game of postponement - a trick he played on himself almost daily, and fell for every time. There would be a poor and evasive morning, with letters to write as well, and a number of phone calls that had to be made; then lunch, at a place not necessarily close, and several things to do after lunch, with mounting anxiety in the two hours before six o'clock: and then a drink, a glow of resolve and sensible postponement..
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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32063ce
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As often with older people he was both bored and unaccountably involved at the same time.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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470bb2b
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He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never lived to find out.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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42605f8
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Each person if he was lucky found the place where he could shine, and the person he could shine on. At Cranley Gardens Johnny had been audience, to Evert, to Ivan, to the whole clever, memoir-swapping gang. But with Pat he was a closely attended performer - he was funny, almost articulate, and rich in things worth saying.
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marriage
loss
relationships
love
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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441b31d
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in a house where he knew all the carpets as territories, castles, jumping squares, there was this other room with a carpet he had never jumped on.
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Alan Hollinghurst |