16th July 2002 - 1:38 p.m.

In England we get giddy at the sight of sunshine and squint into the middle-distance and long to disappear into the grass and sleep or fuck and evaporate into warm forgetfulness. Eyes occasionally meet and we nod our heads as a sign that No, we’re too sleepy to talk and life gets heavily oppressive and we shake it off and carry on drinking.

Words burn apart and ideas disappear completely in the glare so that there are gaps making themselves known, itching themselves into non-being, as we fall around the city. And that scares us as we retire to bed much later in the evening, much earlier in the morning, because it has been raining for six months or more and we have had to stay indoors and play with Ideas – and good Ideas at that – so that the rain wouldn’t ruin us. And some will pull the curtains shut or pile books up against the windows and pretend that nothing has changed, that Ideas must be protected at all costs.

And others of us will cast aside the childish things, the filters of perception, and give ourselves over for a time to living with the gaps and vacant thoughts. The empty spaces create a canvas too large and dead for us to feel at home and so we connect the gaps, like a dot-to-dot for nihilists, and we fall in love.

Yes. Or if not love, then at least into adultery, or betrayal, or infatuation, or anything else that might be love but isn’t, but is nonetheless experience and delight and novelty. And would be love if only it wasn’t quite so wrong. Love is always wrong. That’s why it detains us so.

Love is a folly. A suspension of disbelief by all parties. And yet nothing is as true as a lie shared with another. It bonds like a murder.

Love me, two characters silently plead in Everything is Illuminated. Because love doesn’t exist and I’ve tried everything that does. I sleep some nights with the words on a piece of notepaper folded beneath my pillow.