At one point, I distinctly remember him using the phrase âwhat will the neighbours say?â It wasnât Uncle Regâs fault. That was just the mindset of the times: that happiness was somehow less important than keeping up appearances.
Related Quotes
He just kept thinking, if people are hurting each other now, when we are at our most hopeful, whatâs going to happen in ten years, in twenty years? So he hadnât read it. Didnât mean he didnât love her. Should he say that? Right now?
We clinked bottles and smiled, but his words stung because the life Iâd imagined for myself had slipped through my inattentive fingers. It was not the place that was a backwater, it was me. My spirit had eddied into the shallows of domesticity and beached itself. I had let John down because I had let myself down by immuring my combative originality, which heâd always valued and loved. Yes, my brotherâs words stung âlook how long I have remembered them- but they were a gift: he would not me forget that I had once known other things and made other plans.
It was a good question: why was I behaving like such a twat? I suppose I was doing something dramatic to try and get attention. I realize that, on one level, it sounds nuts, given that I was living in a city that had declared it was Elton John Week, I was about to play in front of 110,000 people, and there was an ITV camera crew in the process of making a documentary about me. How much more attention can a man need? But I was looking for a different kind of attention from that. I was trying to make my family understand that there was something wrong, however well my career was going: it might seem that itâs all great, it might seem that my life is perfect, but itâs not. I couldnât say to them, âI think Iâm taking too many drugsâ, because they would never understand; they didnât know what cocaine was. I hadnât got the guts to tell them, âLook, Iâm really not feeling very good, I need a bit of loveâ, because I didnât want them to see any cracks in the facade at all. I was too strong-willed â and too afraid of her reaction â to just take my mum aside and say, âListen, Mum, I really need to talk to you â Iâm not doing very well here, I need a bit of help, what do you think?â Instead of doing that, I bottled it up and bottled it up and then eventually I went off like Vesuvius and staged this ridiculous suicide bid. Thatâs who I am: itâs all or nothing. It wasnât my familyâs fault at all, it was mine. I was too proud to admit that my life wasnât perfect. It was pathetic.
(Some years ago, he explained to me his belief that that kind of hollow consolation was disrespectful because it presumed that the person being consoled wouldnât see or care about the absence of reason. The thing to do first and foremost, he believed, was not to talk but to listen, and listening, like anything difficult, is easier said than done.).
I am reminded of what Einstein said on the death of his friend: He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.