on scrambling the egg
“The part of me that exulted in performing seemed to make the part that was a poet shrivel up in disgust and become very difficult to find again. I saw it as a tiny sprouting shrub hidden somewhere at the centre, extremely critical of the other parts of me it had for companions. None of these must be allowed to develop too far or they might stifle it altogether. One had to be constantly on the watch, I wasn’t quite sure what against. Self-indulgence was an enemy, so were over-precision and dry mathematical exactness I thought. These stopped the mind floating when it might have floated somewhere unguessed at. I even tried not to learn the name of streets or useful buses, tried to keep everything in what I hoped was a fertile haze - reduced my brain to a sort of scrambled egg.
PJ Kavanaugh, The Perfect Stranger
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