Alas, I never had much sense of irresponsibility. I didn't much care what
other people *thought* of me, but I was horrified by the thought of hurting
anybody I didn't mean to hurt. It always seemed to me that being very firmly
in control of what one was doing, being very careful about its consequences,
was of prime importance; much more so that all of the stuff to do with one's
personal "adventure" of learning, developing, growing etc. - all one big
alibi for lousy self-indulgent egotists in my view, then as now. Life - even
adolescent life - is not an experiment. Other people are not there for one
to experiment on / with. What I may have missed was the extent to which, to
put it bluntly, none of it fscking matters. Everybody's a dickhead at
eighteen, even if they're trying as hard as I was not to be.
Dominic
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