The Golden Notebook

so why are you so perennially wounded?”

why should there be anyone else who com‍

rehends what he is trying to do? After all, there is only one person spinning that particular cocoon, only one person whose business it is to spin it.

person who has been influenced by Marxism takes it for granted that an event in Siberia will affect one in Botswana.

I think it is possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects and creeds. But it was an attempt.

and the danger of evoking a yawn.

Ah yes, dear little things, they are at it again.”

English novel after all does include Clarissa and Tristam Shandy, The Tragic Comedians—and Joseph Conrad.

no accident that I got intelligent criticism from people who were, or who had been, marxists.

They saw what I was trying to do. This is because Marxism looks at things as a whole and in relation to each other—or tries to, but its limitations are not the point for the moment.