Therapy

sin and as explaining it retrogressively by going back to its origin.
    Chap. II       Dread as original sin progressively.
    Chap. Ill      Dread as the consequence of that sin which is the default of the consciousness of sin.
    Chap. IV      The dread in sin, or dread as the consequence of sin in the particular individual.
    Chap. V        Dread as saving experience by means of faith.
     
    I’ve never regarded myself as a religious person. I believe in God, I suppose. I mean I believe there’s Something (rather than Somebody) beyond the horizons of our understanding, which explains, or would explain if we could interrogate it, why we’re here and what it’s all about. And I have a sort of faith that we survive after death to find out the answer to those questions, simply because it’s intolerable to think that we never will, that our consciousness goes out at death like an electric light being switched off. Not much of a reason for believing, I admit, but there you are. I respect Jesus as an ethical thinker, not casting the first stone and turning the other cheek and so on, but I wouldn’t call myself a Christian. My Mum and Dad sent me to Sunday school when I was a nipper — don’t ask me why, because they never went to church themselves except for weddings and funerals. I liked going at first because we had a very pretty teacher called Miss Willow, with yellow curls and blue eyes and a lovely dimpled smile, who got us to act out stories from the Bible — I suppose that was my first experience of drama. But then she left and instead we had a severe-looking middle-aged lady called Mrs Turner, with hairs growing out of a big spot on her chin, who told us our souls were stained black with sin and had to be washed in the Blood of the Lamb. I had nightmares about being dunked in a bath full of blood by Mrs Turner, and after that my parents didn’t make me go to Sunday School any more.
    Much later, when I was a teenager, I used to attend a Catholic Youth Club, because Maureen Kavanagh was a Catholic and belonged to it; and occasionally I would get trapped or dragged in to some kind of service on Sunday evenings, a recitation of the rosary in the parish hall, or something they called Benediction in the church next door, a funny business with a lot of hymn-singing in Latin and clouds of incense and the priest on the altar holding up something like a gold football trophy. I always felt awkward and embarrassed on these occasions, not knowing what I was supposed to do next, sit or stand or kneel. I was never tempted to become a Catholic, though Maureen used to throw out the occasional wistful hint. There seemed to be far too much about sin in her religion, too. Most of the things I wanted to do with Maureen (and she wanted to do with me) turned out to be sins.
    So all this stuff about sin in the chapter headings of The Concept of Dread was discouraging, and the actual book confirmed my misgivings. It was dead boring and very difficult to follow. He defines dread, for instance, as “freedom’s appearance before itself in possibility. ” What the fuck does that mean? To tell you the truth I skimmed though the book, dipping here and there and hardly understanding a word. There was just one interesting bit at the very end:
     
I would say that learning to know dread is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known dread or by sinking under it. He therefore who has learned rightly to be in dread has learned the most important thing.
     
    But what is learning rightly to be in dread, and how is it different from sinking under it? That’s what I’d like to know.
     
    Three spasms in the knee today, one while driving, two while sitting at my desk.
     
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    Wednesday 24th Feb, 11.30 p.m. Bobby Moore died today, of cancer. He was only fifty-one. People in the media must have known he was ill, because the BBC had a tribute all ready to slot into Sportsnight tonight. It included an interview with Bobby Charlton that must have been live, though, or recorded today, because he was crying. I was nearly crying myself, as a matter of fact.
    The first I knew of it was when Amy and I came out of a cinema in Leicester Square at about eight. We’d been to an early-evening showing of Reservoir Dogs. A brilliant, horrible film. The scene where one of the gangsters tortures a helpless cop is the most sickening thing I’ve