Wednesday, 5th February 2003 - 1:06 p.m.

We diarists are fickle creatures. One day, troubled by some minor incident – an unhappy memory, the misplacing of a dictionary, the reading of some poem about mortality – we throw up our hands, and thereafter shudder at the mere thought of giddily tip-tapping out episodic prose-poems, love-letters to the living and the dead. We state, either to our imagined audience or to ourselves, to the mirror or to the screen, that there will be no more entries, that the diary itself is an albatross from which nothing good can come, that life is in the living and not in the describing.

Exquisitely humbled, a few weeks’ passing will bring the next entry and a newly acquired affection for the idea of describing rather than living.

There’s a moment towards the middle of The Immoralist in which Michel, recently recovered from illness, spending the season in a house remembered from his childhood, exclaims:

I mention this in passing, uncertain of why it should spring to mind, and wondering to myself why so many of the books in whose company I spend my time should concern themselves with overlapping subject matter. Gide’s work coincidentally covering the same ground as the first three chapters of Wilson’s The Outsider, the fifth chapter of which concerns itself with Dostoyevsky; the trial of Mitya Karamazov, the closing arguments of which revel in Gogol’s allusion to the troika, mirrored by the courtroom scene from Snow’s George Passant (no relation). It’s curious that I should stumble from one connection to the next without the dead hand of literary criticism to guide me. Curious and, may I say, a tonic in half-lit days.

For I should like to tell you that the opening weeks of the new year have been passed in debauched splendour, but, typically, I have divided them between my reading desk and my sickbed. Perhaps you will say it’s a sorry kind of start to a year, and perhaps I shall quietly concur.

It should be noted that, whilst I have fond recollections of every single book this year has brought to my attention (I take the opportunity to make special mention of Reck-Malleczewen’s astonishing Diary of a Man in Despair), most of the year’s new intake of music has left me cold and bitterly disappointed. The Faint album puts me in mind of Marilyn Manson, and that really wasn’t the plan. Ladytron’s ‘Light and Magic’ is wonderful, but the album with which the song shares its name has the most appalling production, sounding like it was made with shareware. The Interpol album has its moments, but I can’t forgive them for being shoddily tailored, and for sounding like a Strokes 7” being played at 33rpm.

Next week brings us t.A.T.u.’s 200km/h in the Wrong Lane, and it is on this that my hopes presently rest. There are two key reasons for this. One is that it allows me to ignore etiquette for a moment and quote from a previous entry, ostensibly about Avril Lavigne:

Poor manners, I know, but it’s almost a categorical imperative. The second reason is that the album features a synth-pop version of ‘How Soon is Now?’, and anything that would have offended the seventeen year old Nicholas Passant is to be encouraged.

And yet I’m not much inclined, if you can believe this, to talk about pop culture today. The snow falls against the window as I write, and the voice of Lene Marlin fills the cold room. Lene Marlin is the sound of influenza, the sound of willpower having been cracked, broken. The sound, if I may whisper it to you, of this time a year ago, in the bathroom of a Highgate apartment; of the view from the window, city lights spread out mournfully below as I leaned out, the frozen air catching in my throat; of noticing the reflection in the bathroom mirror, and watching as it shook its head and shrugged at me; of spending a whole night reading Hamsun, and going into work the following morning in order to resign, a Valentine’s Day gesture to myself..

Almost a year later, today, the sound returns to me, brittle and heavy-hearted and sorry. Almost a year later, today, I stand again before a bathroom mirror and shrug my shoulders. Almost a year later, today, my double looks away disinterestedly.

None of which can obscure the fact that there’s a war going on, a war likely to be massively intensified in coming weeks. And it’s curious that an Executive quite as hawkish as that of the United States should ignore basic principles of realpolitik, should spread itself, like Rome, so thinly and forgetfully across the planet. The doublethink is clearly to be expected, as geopolitical concerns become evangelical crusades for democracy, and attack becomes liberation, but it’s the combination of pre-emptive foreign policy and the fundamentalist Christianity of the White House that appears most troubling. The hawkish nature of a President unable to distinguish between complex political realities and tales of Good and Evil. The men of learning who gaily provide theories of Rogue States, rogue theories about an Axis of Evil, to give this horrific outlook legitimacy. May such men rest easy now their work is done.

You know the arguments, and don’t need me to repeat them. I shall ask only: will an outright attack on Iraq make terrorist activity in Britain and the U.S. more or less likely? Does an attack on a country close to one supporting terrorism really discourage terrorists? Will there ever come a time when there exists no threat to the U.S.? And, if not, then can you ever foresee a time when this particular crusade will come to an end?