Sabbatical diary

2 a.m. I wake to the sound of mechanical crickets chirping. I have set the alarm to sound like crickets because it helps to minimise the nausea and shock that I have always felt upon waking. I get up and turn on the lamp and collapse into the red chair at the desk. I strike a match and light the candle. It brings to life the icon of the mother of God on the corner of the desk. I drink some water and start to write. I wish I were dead. I wish I could have coffee. I would trade my soul for one cup of coffee. But if I go down to boil the kettle it will wake the children, and since the beginning of the world nobody has ever written anything with children awake inside a house. I finish my six hundred words, it takes an hour, and then I put out the candle and turn off the lamp and crawl wounded back to bed. The whole time I have barely been awake, more dead than alive. I have always found it easier to write in that state. I would be truly happy if I could figure out how to write books while fully asleep. But this is the next best thing.

5.30 a.m. I wheel the bicycle out on to the street. The road gleams blackly under the yellow lamps. There are no sounds except for two clicks as my shoes engage the pedals, and then the blessed whirring of the wheels. The sudden motion creates a cold wind against my face. It is a good thing to be cold and moving on a bicycle before first light. A thin fog hangs over the water as I wind my way down into the national park. After the first hour, big slabs of sunlight fall across the road and the skin thrills to feel the sudden warmth. I do not know if today will be a blessing or a curse, a mother or a stepmother, as the Greeks used to say. But when I feel the first light on my face I bless the day and my spirits glide like whirling wheels within me.

9 a.m. At a desk in the corner of the library I have been reading Erasmus. A retired scholar left his Erasmus collection to the library. Shelves upon shelves of Erasmus. The collected works of Erasmus are legion. They are handsomely bound in thick white volumes. I picked one up idly one day to thumb through it, and before I knew what I was doing I had read six, seven, eight of the big things. I like Erasmus, he is my kind of author and my kind of human being. He agreed with Luther about a lot of things but he never leaves me feeling pale and claustrophobic the way Luther does. I have no reason to be reading so much Erasmus. But I have never needed reasons before so I don’t see why I should start looking for one now.

1 p.m. At the cafe I find a place out in the sun. I brought a book with me but I don’t read it, I just sit there in the sun. A rumpled newspaper lies abandoned on the table. Every so often it opens in the breeze and the page inside shows Miley Cyrus in full colour, nearly nude in knee-high silver boots, mouth painted red. She undresses for me like this whenever the wind blows back the page. Each time I give her an appreciative glance and then the front sheet falls modestly back to cover her. Near the entrance to the cafe a young couple sit facing one another across a table. They are newlyweds, to judge from their age and the self-conscious gold rings on their fingers. The whole time I am here they sit facing one another, gazing in adoring silence into the screens of their phones.

3.30 p.m. On the train a crazy man is harassing a teenage girl. She looks thin and frightened. He bellows at her about Bob Hawke, the former Australian prime minister who holds the world record for drinking 2.5 pints of beer in 11 seconds. “One of the greatest men who ever lived,” the crazy man says, “if not the greatest. Even if I could beat Bob Hawke’s record I would never try. That’s what my father taught me. He told me, even if you could beat Bob Hawke’s record you would never try, out of sheer respect. Take me for instance,” he shouts confidentially at the girl, “I might seem like just an ordinary guy, but the world needs ordinary guys to make the great men stand out, the men of genius. There can’t be great people unless there are ordinary people too, do you understand? Take Bob Hawke for instance. Could Bob Hawke have existed unless I existed too? Obviously not. You see my point.” We saw his point – the girl, me, and everybody else on the train. In Sydney you are certifiably insane just for opening your mouth to speak to any other person on a train. Let alone sermonising for twenty minutes about Bob Hawke.

8.30 p.m. I have been reading a Russian novel about a gambler. There is a peculiar seductiveness in the thought of losing everything. The gambler is seized by an impulse to shake his fist at fate, to turn losing into an act of spiritual defiance, to fall as Lucifer fell, not out of ignorance and certainly not to gain anything but because standing firm is perceived as an obscure insult against the free spirit. I have never gambled anything in my life. If you never gamble so much as a button, you will never be tempted to gamble your last button either. I have no doubt that many people find gambling (that is, find losing) quite purifying. But for my part I avoid it. Not because I have any pious objection to it but because my own innate belief in fate runs so deep. Why should I give the gods a stick to beat me with? They do a good enough job on their own. If life has taught me anything, it's that you can lose perfectly well without having to gamble.

Ten glimpses of Alexandria

1
“To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen” (Plotinus, Enneads, 1.6.9).

2
Once again I dreamed of Alexandria. I woke as if from fever with memories of crooked streets, an empty Mediterranean sky, a woman with black eyes, pitiless and beautiful. Although it is a place I have never visited, although the true Alexandria no longer exists, I remembered the city and winced from the memory as though from fire. Alexandria, the cradle of Egyptian and Hellenistic civilisation. Alexandria, the city created ex nihilo by a Mesopotamian boy who wanted to be Greek, who saw in Greece a universal spirit that could unite the far-flung peoples of a conquered empire. He never saw the city built. Having mastered the world, Alexander gave up his spirit and was laid to rest in glass at the crossroads of the city that bears his name, a city he had never seen except in dreams.

3
Alexandria, city of Cleopatra, in whom nature’s infinite variety became wildly, ravishingly articulate. Even her dying was a triumph, not so much a death as a work of art. Cleopatra has immortal longings in her: she sheds her life as easily as a garment: by an act of will and passion she turns herself freely into fire and air (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, act 5). She was “the last of a secluded and subtle race, a flower that Alexandria had taken three hundred years to produce and that eternity cannot wither” (E. M. Forster, Alexandria, 31).

4
Alexandria, where many worlds converged. Egypt and Greece, philosophy and Christianity, the library and the mystery cults, magic and exegesis. You can keep the pompous pretensions of Rome; you can have the sun-scorched fanaticisms of Jerusalem – only give me Alexandria with its milder climate, its unassuming airs, its “smooth and waveless harbours” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 7.21).

5
At the University of Western Sydney the old convict buildings rest sedately on the banks of the Parramatta River. I take coffee in the courtyard and remember Alexandria. The student clubs are peddling their varied ideologies under a rainbow of pop-up marquees. A DJ is pumping music into the drowsy heavens. I am adrift on a sea of students. European faces, Aboriginal faces, faces from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands. The Lebanese girls go by with their phones held high, proud and beautiful with their shimmering scarves and big designer handbags. There goes the chaplain, a cassocked Irish Catholic priest, head bent in conversation with a Latin American boy who looks very lost in the way that only the very devout can ever be. A girl in blue jeans meets my eye. Do I know her? Have I seen her before? No, it is only that she has Balkan eyes, like mine. I remember her without ever having known her, as I remember Alexandria.

6
In the university courtyard I drink my coffee, sitting still while the whole world moves around me. There is a magic here: it is another Alexandria. Just now it would not surprise me to see Plotinus and Origen go by, locked in conversation about the soul with their teacher Ammonius. It would not surprise me to see Philo coming out of the library with Greek scrolls tucked under his arm, or Hypatia sitting at the cafe eating olives and discussing mathematics and astronomy with a huddle of her star-struck pupils.

7
Today, I am told, there is little reason to visit Alexandria, there is nothing there to see. It is a big industrial city, homogeneously commercial, modern, monotheistic. Its cosmopolitan history is erased. Once a place of many languages, now the signs are all in Arabic. The Jewish population, once 50,000 strong, is said to be less than 50 now. In 2002 the Egyptian government opened a huge new library, big enough to hold 8 million books. They did not blush to dub this monument the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, though the acquisitions funding was paltry compared to the spectacular building costs. The novelist Lawrence Durrell lived in the city in the 1940s and wrote his Alexandrian Quartet about the people there. When he visited again decades later he called the experience “depressing beyond endurance.” Of the old Alexandria nothing was left except the rubble of minor antiquities propped up in museums.

8
“Only the climate, only the north wind and the sea remain as pure as when Menelaus, the first visitor, landed upon Ras-el-Tin three thousand years ago” (E. M. Forster, Alexandria, 120).

9
But a city is more than buildings. A city is a spiritual thing. When Rome was sacked, Augustine consoled his bewildered compatriots: “Perhaps Rome isn’t destroyed. What is Rome, after all, but Romans?” (Augustine, Sermon 81.9). Though Alexandria is gone, though I will never see the streets that I have wandered in my dreams, the true city is not lost. Sometimes I have glimpsed it. Today I saw it, if only for a moment, in a courtyard in western Sydney on the bank of the Parramatta River. The girl with Balkan eyes had a silver anklet. It jingled on her sandalled foot as she went by.

10
From the great Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy:

“As you set out for Ithaka,
hope the voyage is a long one. […]
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
—C. P. Cavafy, “Ithaka”

Notes from Anzac Day

5.10 a.m.
In the dark I struggle with my phone, infernal gadget, to try to make it stop beeping and blinging. Bewildered, I stand there trying to remember why I have made myself wake so early. What do I have against myself anyway? Then I hear the children moving in the kitchen and I remember that it is Anzac Day. I make the coffee and pull on my shoes and stumble out on to the street. Our friends have arrived. We go down to the corner near the train station and follow the crowds streaming from every direction into the park. We are early, well before dawn, but thousands have already filled the park before us. The ground is still muddy from all the rain this week. When the service starts we cannot hear anything, we cannot see what is going on, so we slosh through the mud to find a better spot. We still cannot see anything but now we can hear what they are saying. The Anglican minister is talking about one of the boys from our neighbourhood who enlisted and went to Gallipoli and disappeared there a hundred years ago. Then his brother enlisted and went to Gallipoli to try to find him, and he died there too. Now we are singing a hymn and somebody reads a poem and the bugler plays the Last Post. He plays it well, very sad and slow. Soldiers and school children and old ladies come down and lay wreaths around the war memorial in the middle of the park. Some of them cannot get through the crowd to lay their wreaths. Afterwards we press through the crush of people, our neighbours, to see the wreath that my daughter helped to make. She spent a whole day and then another day making red poppies with her knitting needles and a lot of red wool. We tell her that it is the finest of all the wreaths, which is true.

6.10 a.m.
Someone said it was the biggest Anzac Day gathering in our neighbourhood since the end of World War II. Nothing gets people together like a war and the end of a war. There is a video I saw once of a man dancing in the streets of Sydney the day the war ended. He takes his hat in his hand and dances down George Street, just like that. Fred Astaire in all his glory never looked so good.

7.00 a.m.
Now we have changed clothes, my friends and I, and filled our water bottles, and gone out to salute the cold glad morning on our bicycles. There is no better way to make the most of a morning. It is a national holiday. I do not know if a military day of remembrance can truly be holy, I have my doubts, but if anything can sacralise a day it is three hours in the saddle of a gliding, swooping bicycle. With our wheels close, almost touching, we ride as fast as we can until it hurts, and then we ride faster. We ride in the joy of the day, me and two friends, a German and an Austrian. I warn them that I do not want to hear any German-speaking today, that would be unheimlich and quite unacceptable. But really, what are a couple of world wars between friends on bicycles?

11.30 a.m.
On the way home we go to see a hockey game. My friend’s son is playing. He is a tall boy and he plays well, a good defender, and we cheer for him. When the clock is down to two minutes, one–nil, he turns and looks and sees his father. All day long I keep thinking about it, the way he turned, the way he saw his father.

2.00 p.m.  
Storm Boy is previewing at the theatre on Sydney Harbour. It is the story of a boy named Storm Boy who lives with his father in a shack on a beach in South Australia. After a bad storm the boy nurses three baby pelicans back to health and one of them, a very fine pelican named Mr Percival, becomes his friend. In a storm at sea Mr Percival saves three sailors from shipwreck, and after that some hunters shoot him down. Because he was such a clever pelican, the sailors want to have him stuffed and put in the museum with a plaque describing how the pelican and the boy saved three men from a shipwreck. But the boy knows that Mr Percival does not belong behind cold glass in a museum, he belongs with the wind and the sea. So the boy and his father bury Mr Percival in the sand beneath the wooden post near the shack. It is a good play, my children love it and I love it even more. The pelicans are brought to life by puppeteers who make them waddle around the stage and snap their beaks at fish and spread their wings in flight and die in the arms of a boy.

4.00 p.m.
One of our friends was in the play so afterwards he takes my children backstage and shows them the puppets. Outside a heap of clouds is gathering, another storm, just like the one in Storm Boy. We walk out on the pier and watch the lightning flashing. We wait until we feel the first drops of rain and then we hurry to the car. There is laundry on the clothesline at home and we debate about whether we will make it back in time to get the clothes inside. As always I am optimistic; as usual my optimism is unfounded. By the time we get home the rain has swept the streets clean and all the clothes are dripping on the line.

5.15 p.m.
We got the rain but other parts of the city were struck by heavy hail, as heavy as the hail that fell on the Egyptians. In the pictures on the news the hail looks like snow on the ground. We are disappointed that we got no hail from the storm. We feel that we have missed the best part.

6.00 p.m.
Earlier this week I read Storm Boy to my son because he had never read the book and I wanted him to know the story before he saw the play. “Storm Boy couldn’t bear to be inside. He loved the whip of the wind too much, and the salty sting of the spray on his cheek like a slap across the face, and the endless hiss of the dying ripples at his feet. For Storm Boy was a storm boy.”

7.30 p.m.
Since the beginning of this year four people whom I know have died. This morning we marked the deaths of many thousands. I mean no disrespect to their memories when I say that I cried the most for Mr Percival and felt his death the most acutely, the death of a gentle pelican, a puppet on a stage.

Remembering the New Year: in which our author crashes his bicycle, loses his memory, and gets it back again

It was a splendid way to see the New Year in, a day not to be remembered.

I spent New Year’s Eve on a yacht on Sydney Harbour. There was food and wine. There was music. We saw the fireworks and a stunt plane flying loops over the harbour and a parade of boats lined with yellow lights that glittered on the water. Someone went below and produced Christmas lights and we strung them up along the bow rails. I recall children playing checkers and photos of a wedding and a woman from Shanghai.

From the dock I walked to Kings Cross station, past hungry faces and the din of nightclubs and a woman in high heels, who might have been a man, asking people as they passed if they were looking for a good time. Call me old fashioned, but at that hour of the night I am never looking for anything except whisky and sleep.

At first light I pulled on cycling clothes and left to meet my friend. We carried the mountain bikes on to the train and took the train to the Blue Mountains. There is a fire trail that brings you down to the little village at the bottom of the mountains. I love the village because of the pie shop there and the park where I took my children when they were young. We left the train and rode our bikes down the trail. It is good to start a year like this, with a friend and a bicycle. I am told the ride was very beautiful.

Not far from the end of the trail, my friend sat me up on the ground and asked me who I was. Because I did not know the answer, I joked that I was the King of France and that my subjects would be along presently to help me up. For the past few days I had been reading Huckleberry Finn and I was up to the part where Jim and Huck meet the two hobos who pretend to be an English duke and the King of France. Though I couldn’t have told you my name, not if my life depended on it, I remembered enough of Huckleberry Finn to impersonate one of its characters and to find it very funny.

“Yes, my friend, it is too true – your eyes is lookin’ at this very moment on the pore disappeared Dauphin. Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette. Yes, gentlemen, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin’, exiled, trampled-on, and sufferin’ rightful King of France.”

The neck brace was uncomfortably hot. But I was glad to study the painted green vines, with leaves and flowers, on the ceiling. When the nurse came back, the one who looked like Frank Sinatra, I asked if it would be too much trouble for him to write the 86th chapter of Moby-Dick on the ceiling above my bed. It is the chapter where Ishmael expounds the unique advantages of the whale’s tail. “Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail.”

I told my friend that St Augustine had once lain in a bed like this with the penitential psalms written on the ceiling so that he would arrive in the next world with a face still wet with tears. The psalms are an excellent choice for a dying man. But I was not dying, only knocked about the head and raving mad, so a ceiling scrawled with Moby-Dick would serve my purposes just fine.

Ninety-nine times I asked about my children.

Then I worried that I would not be able to read the ceiling if my glasses were broken. For those who live by reading, nothing in the world is so alarming as the thought of broken glasses. And yet – I cannot explain the miracle but only report it – although my head was bruised and my face was scratched and my helmet had seen better days, the glasses were as good as new. Eagerly I put them on and looked up to read the ceiling. But there was nothing written there after all, and the nurse had gone away.

I have been writing a paper for a theology conference and I was worried that I would not be able to remember what it was about. I wondered if I would have to start the damn thing all over again. I wondered if I would have it ready in time. I wondered if I would recognise my name when they called on me to get up and speak. Then I thought, everything will be all right: my friend Oliver will be there: I’ll ask him to kick my shins under the table when they say my name. And I’ll just have to hope I can remember enough about Shakespeare to say all the right things.

Then slowly, as if waking after long sleep, my life’s deep hurts came creeping back into my mind. Memory laid its bitterness upon my heart, so that when I waked I cried to sleep again.

“A woman had a lost coin. She searched for it with a lamp, and unless she had some memory of it she would not have found it. For when it was found, how could she have known that this was it, if she did not remember it? You have dwelt in my memory ever since I learned to know You, and it is there that I find You when I remember and delight in You” (Augustine, Confessions).

What struck me – apart from a rock on the head – is the things that still come vividly to mind when all the essentials are gone. Name, age, date of birth, place of residence: all vanished. What I remembered was American fiction. St Augustine. My friends. The need to read and write. Also the words to Bob Dylan songs. Forgetting who you are is not so bad when you can lie there singing “It Ain’t Me Babe” over and over in your head.

But never fear, reader: the bicycle is fine! And after a square meal and a good night’s sleep, my brains are working pretty good again too. I tried them out by writing this. It’s not exactly Mark Twain, but then neither am I. I know that much now.

New Camaldoli Hermitage notebook

When I arrive one of the brothers gives me an orientation to the monastery. He shows me the chapel and which books to use for each service, he shows me my cell with its private garden looking out over the ocean, he explains the fireplace and the bells and the time for meals. He tells me what to do if a deer should come into my garden (don’t corner it), and what to do if I see a skunk (ditto), and what to do if one of the mountain lions strays on to the monastery (clap hands and sing a psalm while maintaining eye contact at all times). I wonder if there is anything in the Rule of Benedict about dealing with mountain lions.

Also he tells me: at the right time of the year you can sit in this cell and watch a hundred whales go by. I try to keep my composure, but in my heart I bless the Lord.

The cells are similar in design to the ancient monastic cells that have been excavated in the Nitrian desert. A main sitting room branching off into a small bedroom, chapel, bathroom, and kitchen, all opening on to an enclosed garden. The desert fathers each had a well in the garden too, though many of them also had slaves to draw the water. Taps with running water are one of those small but significant improvements to the monastic life. It is not true that the earliest is always the best.

Soon after arriving I hurry to the chapel for evening prayer. The first words that we sing are one of my favourite verses from the Psalms: I love the Lord, for he heard my cry.

I have not spoken today but I have not been silent either. All day long the voices in my mind chatter away like school children on their lunch break.

Coming out from morning prayer I stood outside the chapel and looked over the sea and saw a whale spouting, then another. For a second I forgot to breathe, as one always does when one sees whales. Then with all haste I got in the car and drove down the mountain to get a closer look. On the winding road down from the monastery I saw them spout again. But when I had got to the bottom and stood on the cliff above the sea, I found that the whales were out of sight. I had failed to reckon on the fact that you can see so much further from higher up. There are times when the closer you get to a thing, the more it recedes from view.

At mass each day the brothers form a circle around the altar and all the guests and visitors make a wider circle. When the presider raises his hands for the epiclesis, all the monks who are priests also raise their hands towards the altar. I like the theology behind this gesture, even if it feels a bit hocus pocus to see so many priests arranged in a circle with their hands stretched out towards the centre. I suppose you have to do this kind of thing in California. Anyway it’s reassuring to know that the mass would still be completed even if a presiding brother were to keel over and die on the spot.

After evening prayer the mountain is wrapped in darkness. I have been instructed to use the torch provided in my cell because it will reduce the risk of walking straight off the edge of a cliff and never being seen again. But I prefer to shuffle cautiously in the dark because the stars, shy nocturnal creatures that they are, come closer when there is no other light. On a high cliff I find a bench and lie down and watch the stars, great thickets of them burning out of the silent past. I remember how I always feared the dark when I was a child, ever since we lived in that place with the outdoor toilet (haunted by Australian spiders) that could only be approached by following a winding path under the menacing trees while nightmares rustled in the dead leaves on every side. Even as a teenager I was forever glancing behind me when I was alone and in darkness. And I remember how nineteen years ago, the night you came down and took possession of me, the first thing that happened was I stopped being afraid. From that night to this I have always found great consolation in darkness. I lie here on the bench beneath the moving stars and think: this is your gift to me, this darkness.

On my morning bike ride I saw a snake on the road. It was a baby, less than a foot long, black with an orange belly and a single orange ring around its neck, and it was trying to cross the road. I stopped a while to monitor its progress and, if necessary, to help it get safely across. Judging from its rather phlegmatic style of slithering, I am not sure it was fully apprised of the precariousness of the situation. But when I gave it an encouraging nudge it only rose its little head as if to strike, so I rode off and resolved to let nature take its course. Coming back later I saw the little thing broken on the road. A car had got him. I hoped his mother would never find out. Sometimes it is better not to know. Let her go on supposing that he has hitched a ride to San Francisco and that he is fulfilling all his dreams in the city. Let her go on hoping. There are people who say that knowing is always best, but if this vale of tears has taught me anything it’s that sometimes a little ignorance can go a long way.

My fifth Thanksgiving dinner in America. Twice with families, once with students, once with the homeless, and now with monks. Evaluation: families have the best cooking, students have the best music, the homeless have the best conversation, and the monks have the best wine.

Each night after evening prayer we sit on mats around the altar. One of the brothers carries consecrated bread and sets it on the altar. Three candles are burning. Then the lights go down and we sit for half an hour in silence. Some of the monks and visitors adopt the lotus position. Last night there was a visitor who filled our silence with the sounds of stifled weeping. When it is over the lights come on and everybody goes away. The icon of the Trinity is asking me a question as I touch the font and go out into the dark.

Sometimes I can hardly tell if I am myself or someone else. Sometimes everything in my life reminds me of you. My eyes look out on the sky and the sea but it all reminds me of you who looked out on this world with human eyes (my eyes) and loved it, every last infuriating bit of it. In your eyes, God looked at the world from the inside and saw that it was good. Not that it was a pretty sight. You saw Satan too. He fell like lightning under your gaze. St Thomas said there are five ways to prove the existence of God. I don’t know anything about that, but when I see my own five fingers they remind me of your hands. My feet, tired from walking, remind me of all the roads you travelled on feet like mine. You have cut your paths in me. Everything in me leads back to you. If I desire anything at all, my longing becomes a path to you: for all desire bends invisibly to you and all love whispers your name. If I were to lose you, my loss would become your way to me: for you take special pleasure in finding whatever is lost. If I were to flee from you, my flight would lead me to you: for you are the door that I would finally reach in search of refuge. If I were to hate and reject you, even my hate would lead me to you in the end, and I would find there that the rejected stone had become the cornerstone of my life. Everything in my life is pointing the way to you if only I have eyes to see. My whole being is speaking your name if only I have ears to hear it. I am the place from which you call to me. I am a constant, painful reminder to myself of the great Love that has touched with human hands, seen with human eyes, and heard with human ears. Love calls to me not only from beyond my life but also from within it. You have got under my skin. That’s my problem and my salvation. There is no escaping a human God.

The Camaldolese brothers have a special love for the Little Rule of St Romuald. It is framed on the wall of my cell. “Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms; never leave it.”

A saying of St Antony: “Life and death depend on our neighbour. For if we win over our brother, we win over God.”

Sunset over Long Beach

Seal
I watch the sea gulls and the pelicans and then I watch two seals swimming in the bay. They remind me of my dog when he goes swimming, black nose gliding through the water. I watch the seals for a long time and I want to cry out to the other people on the beach, “Behold! Seals!” But I know they are watching the seals too, and I know the seals come here all the time. My heart is heavy when the seals go away. But then one of them comes back and makes me glad. There is no kind of evening that does not improve in the company of seals.

Ship
The big container ships creep by in the distance as slow as snails. They are necessary, these steel contraptions. How else could we get all the cheap stuff made in China? Our houses are filled with brave seafaring trinkets. They are necessary, these ships, and they are the ugliest things on the sea. But when one of them is far enough away and when the sun is setting and all the lights come on, a container ship can look as lovely as Christmas. One yearns for it as one yearns for the lonely unreachable stars. Standing on the beach at sunset, a child would give anything in the world to make the voyage out to those far lights that glitter with such heavenly promise.

Saint
A man gets out of a car and stands beside me. He’s one of those gangsta types in baggy gangsta clothes. We stand for a while looking at the sea. Without turning he asks me, “What’s going on?” I tell him, “The sun is setting.” “True that,” the gangsta says. “Happen right here every day.” Then he goes down on to the sand and stays there a long time. Later I see him sitting on the sand, hands folded, looking up into the golden sky. The longer I watch him, the more I am persuaded that he is a poet or a saint.

Love
In the car park behind me a man and woman are arguing in their car. Their voices carry across the sand and mingle indistinctly with the voices of sea gulls and the splash of a landing pelican. I never fail to be impressed by American eloquence. It must be all that therapy. As the sun continues its slow descent over the port of Long Beach, the car park argument gets louder and then I realise they are not arguing at all, only conversing. And there is something else in their voices too: soon they will be making love.

Skirt
A woman in a pink hijab goes right down to the water and takes a selfie with the pink sky and the lights of the Long Beach oil island behind her. When she turns around again a fish jumps, big and silver, and the woman wheels back and squeals in surprise and her long skirt whirls about her in the wind. I wish I could have taken a photograph to show you because it was as pretty as any picture: the pink sky, the pink hijab, the pink and yellow lights, the silver fish, the silk skirt twirling like a dancer’s.

Colour
When I die I don’t want to do it in some windowless white room, doped into oblivion while machines labour over me and faceless doctors tinker with my insides. No black and white death for me! Let me die at sunset. Wheel me out on to the beach and let my eyes be filled with pelicans and my ears with seagulls’ cries. If you can add a seal or two and a pretty Muslim woman startled by a fish, so much the better. Just let me die with open eyes and all the colours blazing, that’s all I ask.

A typical day: Friday diary

God, come to my assistance. Lord, make haste to help me.

I have to give a short talk tonight. I need to write 1500 words. I went to a cafe and got some coffee and wrote it. It was fine. It gave me pleasure to quote the City of God. Everyone in the world wants the same thing: peace. But you can’t get it unless, instead of aiming for peace, you aim for God. Augustine is always coming up with things like that. Another one I read the other day: goodness is something you can possess only by sharing it; as soon as you try to keep it for yourself, you don’t have any.

I walked past an antique store. They had an old three-volume set, very nice, of Boswell’s diaries. I nearly bought them. I stopped myself just in time on the grounds that I already had two editions and still hadn’t read it all. But with Boswell you never feel like you need to read it all. If you are wise you will always save some for later, since never again until the end of the world will there be another Boswell.

I read a book on Hellenistic aesthetics, by Barbara Somebody, with lots of photos of sculptures and paintings. I was moved by all those statues showing infants committing violence. A baby strangling a goose. A baby crushing a duck. A baby strangling snakes in both hands. Also the grotesques: statues of dwarves, hunchbacks, drunken old women. And the beautiful sad slaves. Apparently there is more to the Hellenistic aesthetic than just bad poetry.

A minister was telling me all about Tinder, the dating app. You swipe left to reject someone and right to accept them. He did the hand actions on an invisible phone. Then he said he worried that things like this are diminishing our humanity. His cheeks glowed with pleasure.

I have noted, with some concern, that lately I have forgotten to be afraid of dying. This has made me more cantankerous. A bit insensitive towards my fellow man. I offended somebody yesterday and I think I might have offended someone else today. These are people I like. (I would never offend a stranger.) I wonder if this could explain the famed irritability of our Christian monks and ascetics. Without the fear of dying one runs the risk of becoming just a little bit cranky and unkind.

Missed my afternoon nap in my study. So I snuck into the chapel while no one was around and lay down on the floor for ten minutes. Lying there in the big clear silence, not ten feet away from the baptismal font, my reveries were shattered by the sound of three text messages arriving in my phone. Without checking to see who it was, I wished them harm. In the sacred stillness of the chapel I cursed the sender of the messages and wished them harm.

I had a conversation with a gentleman who loves the novels of Roberto Bolaño. I told him I respect Bolaño, I have read them all, I thought 2666 was tremendous. But love Bolaño? I can’t quite imagine what that would mean. He said, “What about Cormac McCarthy then?” I could tell that we would never see eye to eye on this matter. We talked about Flannery O’Connor, who once said that she had gone to someone's house and they had shown her a chicken that could walk backwards. Flannery O’Connor would have been right at home in the town where I grew up.

I went into a bar and got a beer. All the tables were taken, but an old geezer with a grizzled head and a delirious coloured shirt offered me a seat at his table. He looked a little bit homeless. I toasted his health. He asked me what I was drinking and I said it was beer but apart from that I didn’t know. I asked what he was drinking and he said it was something foreign. Mexican maybe, or Japanese. “But,” he said with immense satisfaction, “it’s the cheapest.”

In the car I am listening to an audiobook of Burke on the French Revolution. I love the eighteenth-century English sentence. It is always full of surprises, if you can pay attention long enough to hear the whole thing out. The nineteenth-century sentence is a different matter. It is like the champagne after the party is ended. The glass is warm. All the bubbles have gone out of it. Drinking it doesn't alleviate your misery but only deepens it.

I stopped on the way home to pick up a pizza. The girl at the counter is pretty in a sultry, inaccessible sort of way. She has a mouth like Scarlett Johansson. And that’s saying something. It is always a pleasure to hand her my credit card. If you pressed your face into her hair it would smell like pizza dough and oregano. But they don’t like it if you behave that way when you’re paying for your pizza. I paid for it and waited, watching an old music video on a big TV above the drinks fridge. The sound was turned down and I kept trying to remember the tune, but in my head it kept getting mixed up with the tune of “Happy.” Then the pizza guy came from the kitchen with the pizza. Unlike most people in his station in life, he looked me full in the face and smiled at me and said my name. He was a middle eastern kid, Lebanese maybe, with one of those thin Muslim beards, and when he handed me the pizza I could have sworn he had the face of Jesus. Or maybe he was just grinning like that because he gets to work with Scarlett Johansson.

My daughter is sick. In a household of this size there is always someone who is sick or down on their luck or torn by a moral dilemma. She woke again just now. I gave her some medicine and put her back to bed. The dog is sleeping in solidarity beside her. He has a better life than any of us, yet he is always the first to sympathise with any human misfortune. Once he ate twelve eggs from a carton that was left out on the table. Once he ate a whole packet of biscuits. Once he ate three chickens. We didn’t give him any sympathy, I can tell you. But when a child is sick he is always the first to lick their face and to lie down on the floor beside them and to stay there through the night, just in case they wake and reach out in the dark and need to feel something strong and reassuring at their side.

Day and night I cry to you, my God.

Postcards from the human race: Parramatta

You can find human beings anywhere, but you will never find a more plentiful variety than on a weekday afternoon in the Church Street Mall in Parramatta, New South Wales.

Here you will see women more beautiful and women more frightening and appalling than anywhere else in the world. You will see women with withered faces and hungry alert eyes and limbs as thin as sticks, combing the pavement for cigarette butts. You will see the Lebanese woman in tight jeans and a peach silk blouse and peach silk headscarf, so lovely you could cry, and the tall black African woman as glorious as a queen with her gorgeous dignity and her gorgeous red and orange clothes and the baby strapped to her waist and the red umbrella that she holds for shade above the baby, and you will see women, former convicts, with tight faces and muscly tattooed arms, and the hunchbacked woman who shuffles past clutching many shopping bags and a little boy, and the woman with the bicycle helmet and the bicycle and the little dog.

You will see disfiguring ailments, faces twisted out of all proportion, bodies barely functioning, legs hardly able to hobble from one end of the mall to the other and back again. You will see young men's bodies covered with expensive colour tattoos and older men's bodies covered with artless prison tattoos, and men of no determinate age with tattoos stretching menacingly up one side of the neck. You will see the most extensive catalogue of facial hair available anywhere in the world: the thin man whose body is bald all over except for the three-foot braided goatee; the round man with the clean-shaven face and the huge neck beard like Robert Browning; the little man with the thick grey moustache that continues in a straight line from the top lip to the tops of his ears and then encircles the back of his bald head, a perfect round belt of hair. If you stare too long, these beards will return one night in your dreams and leave you frightened to go back to sleep again.

You will see the kind fat grocer perched on a wooden stool beside tables laden with ripe fruit. He will call to you as you pass by, "Bananas, two for three dollars. Tomatoes, fresh tomatoes. Mangos, three for five dollars. All fruit grown by wogs. Give the wog a chance, ladies and gentlemen, give him a chance!" You will stop and laugh because others have stopped to laugh too and to buy fruit from the kind fat grocer and his smiling skinny sons.

You will see the tightly knit community of the homeless, the high, and the unhinged congregating around the park benches in front of the cathedral. You will see the heroin dealers with their new sports clothes and their new white shoes and their thick new jewellery, and the edgy characters milling about to score heroin, and the drawn faces hollowed out by heroin, and you will see their girlfriends, not all of whom are prostitutes, scurrying away on errands with plastic shopping bags.

You will see a man resting on his haunches with his head in his hands on the pavement beside the lamp post. Very suddenly he lunges to his feet and, with the precision of a professional boxer, delivers a short sharp blow to the unsuspecting lamp post. Then he goes over beside the green rubbish bin and pulls down his pants and pulls them up again and goes back to the lamp post and squats on his haunches with his head in his hands. He is very sad and agitated because the heroin dealers have not come back yet. Poor fellow, you would give him heroin yourself if you could, just to ease his troubled mind.

You will see a man and a woman, both dressed in matching sports pants with the white stripe down the side, screaming at each other. He strikes her. But it's ok, the police are here, they are never far away, they are always visible in the background in their fluorescent yellow vests. They come over and the woman, who loves her man (where would she be without him?), turns on the police. The police stay until she has calmed down and then they argue some more and a few others wander over and argue too, and then the police have gone because there are other things to attend to, and there are more important things transpiring in the Church Street Mall than a woman screaming at the man she loves and being hit by him.

You will see the man with dreadlocks and a face that looks like Jesus crouching in his dirty blankets on the concrete step, drinking coffee between spasms of maniacal laughter. You will see the big Lebanese man whose brain is addled and who, though he can no longer walk straight or talk in sentences, has never lost his native swagger. And you will see his wife or lover who keeps chasing him away but sometimes touches him fondly when he returns because she cares for him and has always felt safe and good with a man who swaggers like that. Nowhere else in the world will you ever see men with more swagger, or women more ruthlessly loyal to their swaggering men.

You will see lawyers and accountants and local councillors in pin-striped shirts and grey suits, and you will see the accountant in the cheap suit with bits of grass and leaves stuck in his hair, looking as if he could use another drink, and you will see men in borrowed suits on their way to court, one of them a huge brick wall of a man in a black suit with his luxuriant long hair curled neatly and tied neatly back and dyed hot pink, because it's always good to look your best in court.

You will see a woman in old pyjamas, very poor, reclining under the tree and digging deep into her pocket for loose change when another woman, older, even poorer, comes up to her and receives from her a whole handful of gold and silver coins, all that she had, as unthinkingly generous as the woman with the two coins in the Gospel. 

Everything that Dostoevsky knew, this pavement knows too and would tell you if it could speak. Everything Shakespeare wrote about, the gigantic comedy and tragedy of the human race, the ruined kings, the murderous villains, the lovers driven mad with love or jealousy, the fools and tricksters and the lovely fairies too, it is all here, all passing by in front of you if you will only stop and watch for twenty minutes. In a theatre a few blocks from here I once saw a production of Hamlet and it all seemed right, it seemed believable to see such portentous events unfolding here in Parramatta. Swaggering Hamlet and swaggering Claudius and heartless Gertrude and mad Ophelia and dead Ophelia and the toothless whimsical gravedigger, it all had a certain obviousness about it, as if they all were natives of this place, as if the day-to-day affairs of the Church Street Mall had climbed on to the stage.

On finding a diary in the bottom drawer

I was rummaging in the bottom drawer looking for some old papers when I found it. One of those big plain A4 books, rather business-like with its matter-of-fact black cover, red spine, red corners. More like an accounting ledger than a personal diary. Which explains my surprise when I opened it and saw the first page:

A JOURNAL OF READINGS,

(MAINLY THEOLOGICAL)

B. Myers.

July 2002 to July 2004

If you had told me that such a book existed I would never have believed you. I pride myself on being a thoroughly careless, disorderly, haphazard sort of reader. As a matter of principle I allow my reading to be guided by a certain prodigious laziness. I read whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like it. I can re-read the same book a hundred times. I can devour an author's complete works in a spasm of devotion and then, as long as I live, never give another moment's thought to that writer or any of their books. I am not the kind of person who keeps a record of the books I read. Would you keep an orderly account of all the occasions in your life when you have sung songs, or drunk wine, or made love? Reading belongs to the domain of the spirit; it is not groceries, not income and expenditure, not the sort of thing that belongs in a black A4 ledger. 

Yet there it was, as plain as day. My own handwriting staring back at me. I had recorded the title of every book I read for two years, and (what is worse) documented my opinions about each one after reading it. I must have been 24, newly married, a student, pimples on my chin, somewhere halfway between a man and a boy. And in those two years I somehow managed to record – I have just counted them – 163 books, 163 sovereign verdicts on the quality of those authors' writing and the correctness of their Views.

It must have been a feverish couple of years. It must have taken a toll on my eyesight. It must have been the time in my life when I first discovered that I could not see the road at night when driving. The first time I drove the car on to the footpath and sat there, bewildered, squinting through the windscreen and trying to find the edges of the road. My astonished surprise when the optometrist handed me my first pair of glasses and all of a sudden the world became clear as a movie, all the edges of things glistening, sharp as knives.

What led me to that bespectacled state? What prompted me to sacrifice my eyesight at such a tender age, reading books all day and (one must presume) staying up half the night to finish them?

Thumbing through the diary I see that mostly it was Karl Barth, all the volumes of Church Dogmatics and anything else I could get my hands on, as well as dozens upon dozens of impressive-sounding tomes of Reformed theology. Seventeenth-century treatises on predestination. A thicket of dull studies in science and religion. Whole truckloads of T. F. Torrance, Emil Brunner, Anselm, Descartes, and every few pages another one by Barth. And Plato – lots of Plato. I never knew I ever read so much Plato, or liked it so well, or that Plato and Karl Barth had ever been so close together in my mind, growing up side by side like two trees in a garden.

I steal a sideways glance at the scribbled notes. Most of it I can't bear to read. It is always disappointing to discover what a pompous arse you are, how sure of yourself, how confident in your own abilities, how easily you pass judgment on good and bad, truth and error, wrong and right.

Opinion is a beggarly thing; I should have learned as much from Plato if I'd been paying attention. 

Is my 24-year-old self really the right person to be assuring you that a certain critique of St Augustine is "perfectly convincing", or that the climactic scene in Seneca's Oedipus is "poorly executed", or that Moltmann's small-print sections in Theology of Hope are "learned and acute", or that Clark Pinnock is too self-absorbed to be interesting,  or that Bernard Ramm's prose style is one of the most "shamefully incompetent" spectacles in modern theology?

At a few points I see glimmers of promise. Observations that are simpler, more objective and serene, a little less pretentious. Like the single-sentence summary of Augustus Strong's The Great Poets and Their Theology: "He reveres Shakespeare & loathes Goethe." Or the verdict on Hans Schwarz's Creation: "Lots of science, not much theology." Or the description of "the pleasant lack of nervousness and anxiety" in Anselm's writing. Or the observation that Plato's genius is encapsulated in a remark of Socrates to Euthyphro: "Come, then, let us examine what we are saying."

There are mysteries in this diary too, peculiar dimensions of myself that I can no longer access. One note begins with the apology: "In the midst of many more pressing matters, I had time only to read the first half." More pressing matters? Many? Here I was sitting around all day reading 163 books – recording them in an A4 diary – and still I imagined that somewhere in my life there were things that could be described as "pressing"? 

Or there is the mystery of retrospective vision, a thing that is always so enchanting about one's own old diaries. That the bits I thought were important turn out to be irrelevant, while the bits I thought were trivial turn out to be of huge significance. That's how I feel when I notice the January 2004 entry for Hans Urs von Balthasar's Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? I still remember where I was the day I read that book. I remember the impression it made on me, days later, the way it shook me, the way I kept turning it over in my mind for weeks, years afterwards. Yet in a diary where even the most pedantic monograph and the most boorish piece of Calvinist propaganda is honoured with its own meticulous description and review, Balthasar's Dare We Hope is noted – just the title – without a single word of comment.

The most arresting feature of this diary, however, is the way it documents an entire philosophy of reading. This philosophy of reading – let's call it the Reading Mirror – takes it for granted that the whole purpose of books is to reflect back to ourselves our own preferences, assumptions, and opinions. My 24-year-old self sums this up rather bluntly on 6 December 2002, noting – after reading Donald Bloesch's Theology of Word and Spirit – how satisfying it is "to find someone with whose views I feel I can almost entirely agree."

Isn't that where so much of our reading goes wrong? We turn to books, lots of books, looking always for the same thing: ourselves. And we end up finding just what we were looking for. The ego remains at the centre, absorbing other minds and worlds into itself.

There is a whole approach to education that uses books like this. Good books are the ones that share my prejudices and affirm my experiences; bad books are the ones that are strange to me, books full of alien prejudices and remote experiences, books that offend my sense of being at the centre. On these terms even the best books become unfruitful. The seed falls on stony ground; it springs up momentarily but withers, having no roots. 

But the seed that falls on good soil brings forth grain – some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

I have laid the diary back in the bottom drawer. I will leave it there with the other orphans – the papers, files, notebooks, scrawled addresses, unanswered letters, the detritus of a life. Perhaps one day, ten years from now, I will discover it again. Perhaps then it will surprise me all over again, once I have forgotten that it exists, once I have ceased to believe that such a person who read those books and wrote those things could ever have existed. That's the thing about old diaries. I close the drawer. The house is quiet as I go back to my chair and to my book.

Berlin notebook: on tourism

After we had been in Berlin for some weeks, it was decided that we had better do the right thing: we had better see the sights. After all (so we told ourselves), it would be absurd to spend three months in Berlin without knowing what the Reichstag looks like, or Checkpoint Charlie, or the Berliner Dom or the Brandenburg Gate. So at last, more from duty than from conviction, we did the proper thing. We acquired a tourist brochure, complete with maps and instructive tips on where to eat and where to point your camera, and we set off for a day of sightseeing in Berlin.

As we made our way along Unter den Linden towards the Brandenburg Gate, I began to feel strange. Perhaps it was only the crowds and the heat. Perhaps it was only the bad expensive cheese sandwich I had just eaten at the crowded café. We pressed on through a sea of people. Everyone was talking loudly; everyone seemed unhappy. At the corner of Schadowstrasse I noticed the first faint stirrings of nausea. Waiting at the traffic lights, I realised I was not quite myself. A man beside me was eating currywurst with a tiny fork. He dripped curry as he ate the little slices. I wondered if it was dripping on his shoes. In front of me a man was trying to fold a map while a woman chided him in a low voice, looking straight ahead. The light went green and the crowd surged across the street. The currywurst man turned his head and said something to nobody in particular. He gestured with the plastic fork.

When we reached the corner of Wilhelmstrasse the first wave of nausea came. I was profoundly aware of my arms and legs – they moved mechanically, as if by automation – but everything else grew dreamlike and remote. The bodies pressing against me were eerily distant. I registered a flush of heat somewhere near my shoulders. I wondered whether my feet were hurting too: it was a possibility. On the edge of the street, two workmen in hard hats were smoking cigarettes. One of them chuckled. A truck rumbled slowly past.

Moments later we arrived at Pariser Platz. A sea of people and raised cameras. All of a sudden too much colour, too much sound. People gathered in little thickets around tour guides with microphones. Through the crowd ahead, a man dressed in military costume stood at attention on a little soapbox. He saluted and people took photos. Someone else was dressed as a gorilla. I saw the high impassive pillars of the Brandenburg Gate just before the first quick flash of light appeared at the corner of my eye. It flickered on and off like a faulty lightbulb, very bright, sinister and tantalising.

Now everything was reeling in a sickening orbit around my head, the cobbled pavement and the stone buildings and the double-decker bus that had stopped to spill its contents on the street. I reached out to steady myself. There was a steel pole. It must have been a tourist signpost. I held on.

I said to my wife, 'Sorry, I need to sit down for a minute.'

The lights came properly now, bright electric white lights, sharp like knives and moving in stabbing zigzags across my field of vision. The lights were very bright and everything else was dark. I thought: if I faint here, I will knock somebody down. I thought: if I faint and no one gets knocked down, I will crack my head on the pavement. I thought: sightseeing is no good way to die; I won't get into heaven. I thought: I could really use a drink of water.

My wife helped me. I said, 'I'm sorry, I can't see anything.'

She helped me to sit down and I sat there very safe and grateful on the cool cobbled ground. I said, 'You go on, I'll catch up in a few minutes, it's just a migraine.'

It is always better with your eyes closed, so I closed my eyes and watched the violent lights knifing their way across the reddish twinkling darkness.

When it was over I drank some water and we went and took a photograph of the Brandenburg Gate. I recognised the currywurst man standing in a little huddle around a tour guide. They all wore caps and sunglasses. Some of them had the names of cities on their shirts. They set off through the gate towards the Tiergarten, as grave and deliberate as supermarket shoppers.

That was my inauspicious day of sightseeing in Berlin. I don't know why, but tourism has had similar effects on me whenever I have tried it. In Prague I fainted from migraine outside the Powder Gate; the lovely streets were as vertiginous as a spiral stairwell in a tower. The worst fever of my life was in Rome; I fled St Peter's Square and lay in my bed, aware of every aching bone and horribly fascinated by the way the ceiling moved like the surface of the Adriatic Sea. 

It was with characteristic insight that C. S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, portrayed the inhabitants of hell as tourists on a sightseeing bus that makes its way around heaven. Hell is just the streets and buildings of heaven as glimpsed from a sightseeing bus. To be in hell is to be gawking at heaven, peering from the bus and snapping photos and sampling the local food without ever learning to live there or speak the language. 

Anyhow, that's how it is with me. Even the world's most gorgeous streets and buildings, even the most impressive historical monuments, become an affliction when I see them as a tourist. I hate to think what might happen if I was ever forced to go on one of those guided tours to Jerusalem. Probably I would pass out and be found, days or years later, sprawled beside the Pool of Bethesda, waiting for someone to help me get in when the angel stirs the waters.

After we had done our sightseeing I needed something consoling and familiar, so I went to one of my favourite places, the vast abandoned ruins along Revaler Strasse in Friedrichshain. The crumbled gutted warehouses are covered all over in graffiti. The roofs have all caved in or disappeared; the walls are sprouting weeds. An iron gate lies on its side against an ancient vinyl armchair. In what might once have been a factory, there are many high glass windows, and all of them are broken. Standing inexplicably alone is a high brick facade; someone has etched a huge lifelike face on it. A shipping container stands propped up on makeshift stilts. It looks as if it might tumble down at any moment; it looks as if it has stood that way forever. There are broken pipes on the ground and big broken slabs of concrete. Everywhere there is broken glass. 

Here there is no time or history. It is barely even a place. 

Beneath your feet, railway tracks will suddenly appear, then sink again out of sight into the earth. Here and there you spy a lone figure creeping silently among the ruins, taking photographs. Someone is climbing a fence. In the shadow of a broken wall, a man and woman sit on white buckets, smoking contentedly, saying nothing.

I walked around with nowhere to go. Two boys went by carrying skateboards. From somewhere far away I heard laughter. I stopped to look at a black cross made of twisted scraps of steel and mounted on an old electrical box. Two buzzards, sculpted from clay and painted black, crouched like thunderclouds on either side. But the cross was, is, empty. I looked up from the black cross to the bright sky and shuffled away. It was silent as a monastery, apart from the glass and gravel that crinkled under my feet, and, somewhere nearby, the sound of someone's camera going click-click-click, purposeful and slow as a benediction.

Berlin notebook: in the café

When I arrive in a city for the first time, my most urgent priority is to find a place to drink coffee in the morning. As a general thing I find morning to be a very unsatisfactory business, an unwelcome accident that brings the calm oblivion of sleep and dreams all screeching to an insulting sudden halt. There are people who talk of climbing out of bed in the morning, or even of quaintly hopping up, but I have never understood these innocuous playground metaphors. I am wrenched out of bed, otherwise I would lie there all day. Amid the violent assault of morning, amid this cruel inhospitable turmoil that is called Waking Up, I have a terrible need for something calm, stable, friendly, and predictable. And so the morning coffee is my anchor. Without a good consoling place to drink some coffee and scribble in my notebook in the morning hours I am all adrift, just as some people come unmoored if you take away the television or the daily crossword puzzle or the telephone call from Mother.

So when we got to Berlin and moved into our apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, I quickly located the coffee shops in the surrounding streets. At first I went to a place called Café CK on Marienburger Strasse. Now by any ordinary standards, this is an excellent place to take your morning coffee. The baristas are friendly and attractive, the coffee is good, the big blue sofas are cosy and anonymous, the walls are adorned with paintings, the music is smooth, a little bluesy, never too loud or too distracting. Everything is in order, as the Germans like to say. But after my fourth consecutive morning at Café CK, I began to feel vaguely troubled and uneasy. Something about the place wasn't right, though I couldn't quite put my finger on it. 

On the fifth day I ordered coffee and sat down and looked around me – and that was when it struck me. The place was too clean. The sofas were all as good as new. The floor was polished. The walls looked newly painted. The espresso machine had been lovingly shined and polished like a boy's first car. Even the light fittings all matched; not one was cracked or broken. Everything was, in a word, perfect.

I left without finishing my drink and went out into the street. On the corner a boy was standing on a cardboard box and playing an accordion. I tossed a coin into the hat and crossed the road. I walked to Café Slörm on Danziger Strasse, where the roughly fitted floorboards creak and all the furniture is worn, faded, decrepit, forty years old and falling slowly to pieces. The front door is plastered with stickers that are peeling away to reveal the scrawled graffiti underneath. The coffee tables are rough wooden crates turned upside down with bits of rusted nails jutting from the corners. There are little homemade shelves with flowers arranged in beer bottles beside mismatched lamps in tattered yellow lampshades. The walls are crumbling away to reveal the red bricks underneath; everywhere there are signs of repair, patches of repainting, nails hammered in and pulled out again. Here and there one sees furtive ironic outbursts of graffiti. Against the big front window are some orange vinyl barstools; you can sit there only if you don't mind resting your feet on the cast iron radiator. Or you can sit facing the bar on a row of vintage folding cinema seats; they look extremely chic and extremely uncomfortable. 

Out behind the bar there is a second room: you can see it from here, since some practical-minded person has made a window by smashing a rough hole through the dividing wall. In one corner the floor is raised on a carpeted platform, supporting a green sofa and a steel table that looks as if it was once a filing cabinet. Above the sofa, stuck to the wall with tape, a series of nude sketches done in charcoal. Big flat cushions and worn velvet cushions and books and magazines scattered on the floor. A table in the far corner appears to be a sort of workbench; someone has taken apart one of the wooden crates and stretched chicken wire around the sides. Perhaps they will use it for mice, or small rabbits. Perhaps guinea pigs. Or perhaps it is merely art. In another corner a wooden chair is painted all over with whimsical cartoon pictures: a whale sipping Coca-Cola through a straw; vines and flowers sprouting from the wood; an enormous cat with enormous cat eyes. A few more chairs sprawl idly around a three-legged table. In the very back there is a high bird cage, the home of two South American parrots named Paula and Leo. A chalkboard on the wall asks you not to feed the birds. Leo flaps his wings and squawks; the floorboards shudder with punk music; everything is a little too loud and a little too severe.

I sit here and drink my coffee, happy at last, and I have never gone back to that other place with its matching decor and comfortable chairs and shiny bright espresso machine.

The Berlin aesthetic: it had got to me. And as long as I was in that city I could abide nothing that was clean, or new, or flawless, nothing that had not already been repaired and ruined two or three times, nothing that was more than barely serviceable, already (and again) on the brink of decay. 

And so at Café Slörm I drink my coffee from a cracked bone china cup while a mangy dog comes over and sniffs around my feet, and the barista sits outside smoking a cigarette on the broken concrete steps. A pretty girl rides by on an old repainted bicycle made of spare parts. The handlebars are very high and wide. I thumb through one of the books on the overturned crate beside me. It is a scholarly monograph, lavishly illustrated, a feminist interpretation of pornographic photography in 1920s Berlin. Some of the pictures are very good. 

The music gets louder; it pounds in your head like a hangover. The coffee tastes a little burnt. The yellow armchair is a little too low, and all the vinyl is peeling off the sides. You have to adjust your weight carefully if you don't want to feel the broken springs digging into your back. Like any self-respecting Berlin café, the total effect of the place is to make you feel that you are in someone else's living room – someone who might have, to be sure, some vaguely sinister intentions, but who is nevertheless quite sociable and hospitable on the whole.

I get another coffee. I kick my shoes off and put my feet up on the chair beside me. I scratch a few lines in my notebook and read the chapter about Anita Berber. I study the photographs and conclude that she was rather beautiful, in that vacant pitiless nightmarish sort of way. The sun falls through the window across the floorboards. I close my eyes to the sun and the music and the sounds of making coffee. It is good to be here. Yes, there is a certain tattered homeliness about it all, and everything is all right now, here in the unassuming dilapidated comfort of morning in a Berlin café.

Berlin notebook: on the Berlin aesthetic

Crossing Eberswalder Straße, I saw an American tourist looking around, perplexed, clutching his camera as he surveyed the street in search of something that might be worth photographing. The woman beside him said cooly, 'I mean, they have buildings here with all the wires hanging out.' 

In other European cities the past is always visible. You visit Rome or Prague or Constantinople to see what the past looks like. In fact you could visit those cities almost without noticing the existence of the present, since the present is less solid, less tangible than the continuing presence of the past. But in Berlin there is no past; or rather, the past is visible only as ruins and decay. 

The city was reduced to rubble in the Thirty Years' War, and again, three hundred years later, in the Battle of Berlin. 'In other European cities, the past was glorified, the architecture spruced up for tourists to the point of caricature. But here, nobody seemed in a hurry one way or the other. Buildings had been bombed and the city had been ripped apart, but years later holes remained all over the place without explanation or apparent concern. The city moved forward with a lack of vanity that she found relaxing' (Anna Winger, This Must Be the Place).

Berlin is a city founded, time and again, on its own ruins. Urban decay is the Grundprinzip of the city, and the secret to the Berlin aesthetic. In Berlin there is no history, only art. Those bits of the past that remain visible are fragments that have been picked out and arranged for aesthetic and artistic purposes. The city is a gigantic lovely mad assemblage of found objects. 

This explains the importance of photography as an art form in Berlin. Photography eschews the sentimental Christian ideals of narrative, history, truth-telling, tradition, and time. Every photograph is only a fragment, a piece of rubble retrieved from the debris of time. 'Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt' (Susan Sontag).

At a gallery in Kreuzberg, I saw the exhibition of a young Berlin photographer. He had photographed sculptures made of urban debris – old brooms, crumpled newspapers, plastic bags, advertising signs, cardboard boxes, broken electrical goods. The objects had been assembled in front of walls and buildings; the sculptures look like random piles of rubbish, but the shadows cast on the walls resemble classical figures from Christian art. The distinct shadowy figures of Christ, St Nicholas, St Sebastian. In this series of shadow photographs – obviously inspired by Plato's theory of forms – one sees the strange distinctive contours of the Berlin metaphysic. Human culture and religion and tradition are shadows on the wall, the beautiful insubstantial images cast by objects more solid, permanent, and original. Except that here the eternal Platonic forms have been replaced by the most transitory, pointless thing in the world: a heap of urban debris.

The Christian myth of primordial harmony is the organising theological principle of most European cities. (That is what separates European cities so markedly from the colourful polytheism of urban India, and from the steel-and-glass Pelagianism of the cities of America.) But in Berlin, the Christian creation-story has given way to a mythology of primordial originary decay: 'In the beginning was the rubble…'

The Roman might well feel that she is living in an eternal city; but the Berliner dwells in the ruins of time. And the ruins of time are beautiful. That is the Berlin aesthetic.

Berlin notebook: on the existence of Germany

I was well into my twenties before I ever believed in the existence of Europe. Even then I believed only in France. (I also cherished a certain guarded agnosticism about Switzerland; I had been there once, but too briefly to determine if it was real.) It was not till years later that I became firmly persuaded of the existence of Germany.

If this seems surprising, it will be enough to remind you that I come from a remote primordial island-continent known as Australia. Now Australia has many virtues, as everybody knows; but it is a long way from anywhere else, and it is very hard to believe in other places when they are so far away. 

My country's immigration policy is one of the natural extensions of this principle. Our attitude towards our own indigenous population is another. If there were once only indigenous inhabitants in Australia, it suggests that once we did not belong here; but we could not have come from any other place, since Australia is – we feel it deep in our bones – the only place. So the existence of indigenous peoples is an unfathomable abyss. It strikes us as an alarming proof of our own nonbeing, and therefore as something that is best simply ignored.

The same conviction also explains what is called the 'cultural cringe' – one of the most peculiar features of the physiognomy of Australian culture. There are countries in which artistic, literary, and intellectual achievements are paraded as marks of national superiority: think of the way Americans will talk about Mark Twain, or Germans about Goethe. But in Australia we apologise for our cultural achievements. The cultural cringe is the belief that nothing of value can come from a place like Australia; that anything of real worth must be created someplace else, or at least receive the imprimatur of other places. So Australians will be embarrassed of a homegrown novelist: but if she happens to win a British literary award, we will praise her and love her and perhaps even buy her books. 

The cultural cringe comes about when Australians discover, usually quite late in life, that other places exist – and we never really recover from the shock of it. The shock produces an inverted idealism: instead of believing that my country is the only one, I now understand that it is, after all, a disappointing mirage. Only the other places are real.

Australia thus unites two antithetical (but morally identical) ways of relating to outsiders: either we ridicule foreigners for their funny looks and funny accents, or we abase ourselves before the foreigner – so fashionable! so sophisticated! – and lament that we were ever born in a drab uncultivated penal colony at the bottom of the world.

Even when I had been trying for years, with discouraging results, to learn the German language, I still secretly thought of Germany as a country so far away that it does not exist; and of the German language not as an ordinary means of social exchange between ordinary human beings, but as a sort of magic, something that people like Hegel and Heidegger use for conjuring. I learned German grammar the way seminarians learn their Greek: as if memorising runes. I quoted German the way seminarians invoke The Original Greek in their sermons: as if uttering the syllables of an incantation, something that transcends the limitations of ordinary speech. 

But there came a day in my life when I had to admit to myself that Germany exists, and that the German language is really, after all, only – a language. That was a hard day and a hard lesson. For everything in Australia, the whole moral fabric of my childhood world, was premised on the conviction that Australia is the only place, and that any place you cannot reach by the Pacific Highway – radio blaring, elbow out the window, cane fields rushing by – is, strictly speaking, no place at all. 

Nowadays though, I like my country all the better for the fact that it is not the only one. I'm glad there is a variety of places in the world; I'm glad there is even, somewhere, a segregated location for all the New Zealanders to inhabit. But in Berlin whenever I meet a person who has never been to Australia, I immediately adopt the persona that I have learned so well over so many years (and that makes Australian expats such powerful ambassadors of the Australian tourism industry). 'What?' I cry in shock, as though I had just met a fellow who had spent his whole life underground. 'Never been to Australia? Never even visited? What the devil have you been doing all these years? Sit down, sit down – two beers, bartender, quickly! – and let me tell you a few things about a magnificent great island at the bottom of the world…'

California notebook

The future

‘As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future.’ —Alison Lurie, The Nowhere City, 8.

The slide

‘In Los Angeles, all the loose objects in the country were collected as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.’ —Saul Bellow, Seize the Day, 12.

Pasadena

The night before the Rose Parade, the Oklahoma preacher makes his way slowly down Colorado street, holding above the crowded sidewalk a big yellow sign about Jesus, the Bible, and the afterlife. Ten paces in front of him, his eleven-year-old daughter keeps the same funereal march, pointing the megaphone straight ahead like a pistol and proclaiming the King James gospel at 120 decibels. I thought: One day she will write a book about all this.

The idea of home

We stayed in that big house on the hill overlooking the sea. Everything was new, clean, polished, straight off the pages of a magazine, migrainously bright. It was not so much a home as the idea of a home, just as Starbucks is the idea of coffee and The Smurfs 3D is the idea of a children’s movie.

Disneyland

I am a cynic, a hater, a vehemently eloquent critic of the Disneyfication of childhood. Anyone who will listen, I tell them what’s wrong with Disney. I tell them: ‘You should not always follow your heart.’ I tell them: ‘The Real You is, at times, an abomination.’ I tell them: ‘Your little girl is not a princess.’ I tell the little girls: ‘Your aim in life is not to marry a prince.’ When we agreed to take our children to Disneyland I made wry remarks from the side of my mouth, I spoke of compromises and the sacrifices we make for our children, I prepared myself for the gruelling spiritual trials of a whole day at Disneyland, though secretly I wondered whether we might persuade our children to leave a little early. Then the day arrived. We walked through the gates and we were in Disneyland. The coloured shops and houses were bathed in a soft nostalgic glow, the streets curled away lazily into the distance, a horse-drawn streetcar pulled up beside us, the music of half-forgotten childhood movies started playing from somewhere beyond the sky. Everything was Sunday and Pollyanna and homemade lemonade and America. I peered carefully at a drifting cloud to check if the sky was real. We stayed for fourteen hours, until my children had to beg me to take them home.

Prison

We were eating breakfast and I was telling him about the evils of California's penitentiary system. ‘You know, the percentage of incarcerated citizens in the United States is seven times higher than in Australia. And a seventh of all those American prisoners – mostly African Americans – are here in California. It's because the prison systems here operate just like any other corporate enterprise. The prison guards union is one of the wealthiest and most powerful political forces in California. The Three Strikes legislation, for example – one of the most unjust pieces of legislation in American history – was backed by the prison guards union. For them, it's all about keeping the prisons full, expanding the number of prisons, and expanding the number of people working in prisons. A few years back here in California, over 10 percent of the whole state budget was spent on prisons. Just compare that to schools and universities. Just compare it to rehabilitation programs. I mean, once you’ve been incarcerated in California you’ve got like a 90 percent chance of returning to prison – 90 percent! My God, do you know how much money is at stake in all this? Do you know how many new prisons have been built in California in the last twenty years? The dream of these malignant sonsofbitches is to have half of California behind bars, and the other half gainfully employed as guards in correctional facilities.’ He chewed his food thoughtfully and said, ‘Man, I hear you. It ain’t easy. Wherever I go, them police move me on. I try to sleep behind the dumpster, they move me on. I stand in front of the store with a cup, they tell me they’ll send me back to jail. Man, it hard keeping out of jail in California.’

Los Angeles

He took me hiking in the mountains and in hushed tones told me the names of the birds. When we had reached the edge of a steep ravine and all we could see were the mountains, the sky, the cool stream and the canyon, he stopped and said, ‘There it is. My favourite view of Los Angeles.’

Whales

The day I went whale watching at Newport we saw the biggest pod of killer whales that has been sighted in these parts for nearly a decade. There were fifty of them, and they swam alongside us and swam in front of us and glided underneath the boat, their white patches shimmering like immense green lights beneath the water. They were so close and so good and gleaming and so startlingly alive that it took the greatest effort not to throw myself down into the sea as a happy mad grateful gesture.

Celebrities

It was a deflating experience. I had gone into Target on the way home because I needed toothpaste, and I stood at the checkout contemplating the infinite melancholy of big department stores, and then in one of the lines I saw a celebrity, and some of the Target staff left their checkouts to go over and shake his hand and tell him they loved him. I looked down at my tube of toothpaste, averting my eyes, and to tell you the truth I felt very sorry for the poor bastard.

Languages

‘I’m going to cycle around Europe,’ he told me as we started on our second pint. ‘I dunno, maybe stay and work there a while. Maybe learn a language. I've always wanted to learn a language.’ He had lived all his life in LA, so I asked him what about Spanish, did he know that LA has more Spanish-speaking people than any other place in the world, after Mexico City? He said, ‘No, I don’t like Spanish, I’ve never liked it. It’s just such a – an ugly language.’ I asked him which languages he liked. ‘You know, maybe French, Italian, maybe something like Polish – hell, I dunno, even German.’

Cracks

Jamie and I were walking down the street and as usual Jamie was carefully stepping over the cracks in the sidewalk. When an old homeless guy shuffled past in his broken shoes, Jamie told him matter-of-factly, ‘If you step on the cracks you’ll die.’ Without stopping the man nodded his profound grizzled head and said, ‘Yeah brother, they hard rules. One false step and it’s all over. That's hard rules right there, brother.’

The mysticism of the freeway

‘The freeway experience … is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can “drive” on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participants think only about where they are. Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over…. “As you acquire the special skills involved,” Reyner Banham observed in an extraordinary chapter about the freeways in his 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, “the freeways become a special way of being alive…. The extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical”.’ —Joan Didion, The White Album, 83.

Venice Beach

Along the brokenhearted strip of break dancers, jugglers, bad musicians and graffitied trees and sinister-looking fortune tellers, amid the slouched huddles of storefronts peddling pipes and hotdogs and t-shirts and tattoos, the medical marijuana clinics are newly painted, clean, seedy, legitimate. A guy in dark shades and a bright green lab coat takes a drag on his reefer and calls out, ‘Step inside, ladies and gentlemen, right this way, the doctor is in. Headache, back pain, insomnia, sadness – it's good for whatever ails you.’ You peer inside doubtfully, and decide you’d rather take your chances with the guy in gangsta clothes and prison tattoos down on the corner.

Australia

I told him I was from Australia. ‘Australia? For real? It must be nice, all them animals. But you got no sidewalks in Australia – it’s an amazing place.’

Mexico

When I told her I wanted to go to Mexico she said, ‘Mexico? Mexico? What you wanna go there for? Mexico – oh God, it’s so gross. You been to Sacramento? You been to Vegas?’

Dentist #1

He stumbled into the room, leaning heavily against the wall. His speech was slurred and he had to strain to keep his eyes open when I explained the details of my daughter’s accident. She had been running outside with her friends at a Mexican restaurant in Laguna Beach. There was a steel handrail. She didn’t see it and she ran right into it. One tooth out. Both front teeth broken in half. He made me repeat the part about the Mexican restaurant. I explained that we had wanted fish tacos. He slouched out of the room, bumping into the door frame and murmuring to himself as he shuffled off down the hall. It was nine in the morning, and he was either extremely drunk or (as I surmised) had been helping himself to the opiates from the medicine cabinet. Their website boasts that they have their own qualified anesthesiologist and can provide sedation upon request. When I walked out and told the receptionist that we would not be coming back because the doctor was not sober, she feigned mild surprise – ‘Really? Not sober?’ – and then whispered confidentially, ‘You could try coming back tomorrow.’ My daughter told me afterwards that she loves all dentists, but was frightened of that one.

Dentist #2

Our next dentist was a pretty Iranian woman who pursed her lips sympathetically when my daughter explained how she had broken her teeth. We read the comic books and children’s magazines in the waiting room and we got her teeth repaired. My daughter never groaned or flinched once until it was all over and the dentist gave her a mirror so she could admire her perfect new teeth. Only then did she burst into tears, because she had grown used to those ghastly sharp cracked tomboy fangs, and she resented her smooth new unblemished American teeth.

Reality

In Balboa Park in San Diego we saw a man with no arms singing country songs and playing guitar with his toes. Jamie whispered, ‘Does that man got no arms?’ I nodded. He said, ‘Is that man really playing with his feet?’ I nodded. Then he said doubtfully, ‘Is that man real?’ The boy had been to Disneyland, he had been to Malibu, he had seen the film crews at Santa Monica and Altadena. He knew that in California you can never be quite certain whether or not a thing is really real.

Dentist #3

A few days later I heard her telling one of her friends: ‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a dentist.’