Something in me slightly thawed, and I thought for the first time that it might be possible to live, among such people, without hiding who you were and what you wanted.

Brian Dillon (who gave a marvellously rich talk on hypochondria at the Dying Artist event), writing on his education.

(I’m pursuing here, and will go on pursuing until its limits become clear, an analogy between being “an intellectual” and being “a homosexual” - it’s not wholly clear that anyone is ever really either, of course, but both terms have, it seems to me, a similar explanatory/obfuscatory value. That is, there are parts of our shared social world, and parts of some people’s intimate life-histories, that it’s difficult to make sense of without them; and yet this sense is always somewhat confused, entangled and problematic, which is no doubt as it should be.)