The trouble with questioning, of course, is that once you’ve started it’s hard to stop (‘Stopping: good or bad?’, ‘Being stopped?’) But since one has to stop somewhere, and since only a madman would try to answer more than one question at time, it is best that for the moment we concentrate on the question we most owe it to ourselves to answer, the question, surely, we were put on God’s earth to contemplate (‘God: good or bad?’) – ‘What makes us happy?’
Sex is good. Or at least, good sex is good. Bad sex, it should be underlined, was never anything to write home about. Food also, although clearly here we enter the vexed arena of taste: chowder, say, or croute de pâtés fricassées. Breathing – we should not, and especially in this dark time, forget breathing – the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide with the external world. Circulation generally. The right to remain silent. The willing and unrestricted exercise of limbs. (Pleasure: good or bad?) The historic season of ardor. An acquaintance with bodies not one’s own. [By which of course, I mean physical bodies, bodies of land say, or water: funding bodies can go straight to hell.] Freedom (good or bad?). At any rate some degree of autonomy. A small corner of one’s existence not given over to getting through. Time (good or bad?). Solidarity (good or bad?). Light entertainment? Moral rectitude? Acting on a whim. Not acting on another person’s whim. Trust (good or bad?). Sincerity (good or bad?). Communication: good or bad? ‘What, even now, might be undone?’ Not watching on as one’s whole system of government is reduced to a flicker of personality. And I don’t know about you, but I think that would really cheer me up, put the spring back in my step, the proverbial cock back in my hoop. As in cock-a-hoop. As in, ‘Today I’m cock-a-hoop’. Not being lied to - although of course you can’t ask for everything. Except that you can, actually, ask for everything, that is. It’s just that on the whole people don’t. What is to be done? Personality: good or bad? Having it all ways. Having stopped.