You think things will change, they have to, but instead years go by and nothing happens, creating a biography of no incident or effect.

I woke up as myself again.

Slowly, life recedes with poverty, sloth and disengagement, and those simple pleasures of going out and doing things, seeing things, eating things and so on seem like unimaginable indulgences, as far away from one's life as yacht in St Tropez.

While others do, I observe, but also barely even that. I exist like a jellyfish, like lichen, like a cloud.

I hold a moment up and gaze inside, turn it around and view the emptiness from all angles.

This is the dirty secret of my life.

They were not me, their feelings could never be mine, and I could only go deeper into myself, into a darkness which no light could find, and in the end I still had to come out and meet the world on its own terms.

I saw the future, and ran away to China.

If I had studied law, none of this would have happened. But I didn't think about the future.

I had nothing to say, but this didn't stop me.

I understood my talent was for feeling and gratification, and decided to master the techniques of pleasure.

A consoling thought: it could always have been worse.

I had no ambition, and achieved it.

There was a knot in me that I spent 40 years unpicking.