Liberation by Christopher Isherwood

feel no, it’s physically impossible!
    Billy Al and some of his other friends who were there played it very big as aficionados, they were really just like bullfight fans. And as always with aficionados you wondered, justly or unjustly, can they possibly care that much?
    A word about my meditation. It’s almost absurdly bad. Yet I am going through the motions and isn’t that something? It comes to me often how hard it is to meditate unless you are leading a disciplined life related to meditation, i.e. in a monastery. Still, I know that that’s neither here nor there. I am not in a monastery. I am not leading a hellishly wicked life, either, however, and I am living with someone who also practises meditation, which is a great blessing and help. So let me make up my mind to go on and on trying.
    Don arranged for Jo [Lathwood] and Alice Gowland to have their horoscopes done by Jack Fontan. This was a huge success. Jack told Jo she was a “crape-hanger” and that she had got to stop it, which impressed her and filled her with good resolutions. In order to get the horoscope drawn up, Jo had to give Jack her real age, of course. She wrote it in a sealed note which she gave to Don to pass on to Jack. While Don was down there the other day he read it. She’s sixty-eight. He had guessed she was older.
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    October 2. This is just to announce that I bought a new typewriter this morning, another Smith-Corona Electric. For some reason, because the keys are enclosed perhaps, I don’t make nearly so many mistakes as on the old one, particularly those slips off a with my contractured little finger which kept landing me on z . But why can’t I underline properly, I wonder? No time to find out now, because Bill Inge, Paul Dehn and Leonard Stanley 42 are coming to supper. . . .
    October 3. It’s so typical of me in my old age, this fussing about details. In this case, the underlining key on my new typewriter. I simply could not meditate this morning because I was worrying about it and impatient to call the typewriter shop and ask about it. Now I have done so and find that there will be no one in the repair department till Monday. So relax, buster.
    Our dinner was quite a success, because Paul Dehn talked a blue streak and Leonard Stanley knows how to be a pleasant guest when older queers are present. Poor old bulky Bill looked, at moments, as if he had just had a stroke—that staring expression. Don thinks he won’t last long. You feel his terrible melancholy.
    The smog was so bad yesterday that Bruce Connors at the gym said one really shouldn’t go out jogging in it; making yourself breathe heavily and inhale all that stuff does you much more harm than the exercise does you good.
    Don is doing such interesting work. I keep urging him to show it to Billy Al Bengston. He does so need some strong professional encouragement—but he hesitates; he’s afraid Billy won’t like it.
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    October 23. This morning I finished chapter 15 of Kathleen and Frank , though of course Don may suggest some revisions when he reads it. Now there are the two big chapters of direct quotation to proofread; very little can be done to them.
    Still nothing definite about “Frankenstein,” but Hunt Stromberg did call and say the studio wants to go ahead. Am very glad I’ve had this break, as it’s enabled me to get ahead with the book.
    Swami has been ill again, or weak, anyhow. But this is partly a means of exerting pressure on Belur Math. Now his doctor has written them a letter and we have sent cables, begging and blackmailing them for an assistant.
    Had a dream about Swami a few nights ago. He was making a speech, in which he seemed to be attacking Ralph Hodgson (the poet). When he did this, people hissed. I knew he didn’t mean it, that this was a misunderstanding. I tried to clear things up. And woke. Well, if not spiritual, this was at least a “loyal” dream!
    Whenever I