In contrast, I tried to dissociate myself from my body, as if it were an embarrassing friend I no longer wanted to know. My pride, my sense of myself, my identity, if you will, didn’t disappear; rather, it emigrated. I noticed this with my friends. Some of them had gone to the House of Lords; they sat on committees. They were given “tribute” evenings; they picked up awards, medals, prizes, and doctorates. The end of the year, when these things were handed out, was an anxious time for the elderly and their doctors. Prestige was more important than beauty. I imagined us, as if in a cartoon, sinking into the sludge of old age, dragged down by medals, our only motion being a jealous turn of the head to see what rewards our contemporaries were receiving.

Some of this, you will be delighted to hear, happened to me. My early plays were occasionally revived, most often by arthritic amateurs, though my latest play hadn’t been produced: it was considered “old-fashioned.” Someone was working on a biography, which, for a writer, is like having a stonemason begin to chisel one’s name into a tombstone. My biographer seemed to know, better than I did, what had been important to me. He was young; I was his first job, a tryout. Despite my efforts, we both knew my life hadn’t been scandalous enough for his book to be of much interest.

However, I’d written my memoirs and made money out of two houses I’d bought, without much thought, in the early 1960s, one for my parents and one for myself, which turned out to have been situated in an area that became fashionable.

Lately, what I have wanted to be cured of, if anything, was indifference, slight depression or weariness; of the feeling that my interest in things—culture, politics, other people, myself—was running down. A quarter of me was alive; it was that part which wanted a pure, unadulterated “shot” of life.

I wasn’t the only one. A successful but melancholic friend, ten years older than me, described his head as a “raw wound”; he was as furious, pained, and mad as he had been at twenty-five. No Nirvanic serenity for him; no freedom from ambition and envy. He said, “I wouldn’t know whether you should go gentle into that night or rage against the dying of the light. I think, on reflection, that I’d prefer the gentle myself.” But it is as if your mind is inhabited by a houseful of squabbling relatives, all of whom one could gladly eject, but cannot.

But where to find consolation? Who will teach us the wisdom we require? Who has it and could pass it on? Does it even exist?

There was religion, once, now replaced by “spirituality,” or, for a lot of us, politics—of the “fraternal” kind; there was culture, now there is shopping.