I struggle against daily disenchantment. Tabloid tales of profligate greed and corruption, writ in ink as a substitute for the blood of the poor. The cold eye of a prospective employer. That creepy feeling at the bank, where I'm every inch the alien, not just from another country, but from another world.

On bad days I retreat into my flat. I listen to mopey music and daydream about points in the universe into which everything, even light, disappears. Memory's an opiate for the deeply injured ego; it drugs my senses with remembered love, love that finds its dull echoes in the letters and e-mails of the past, now that the skin, heat, breath are gone.

...

On the good days, I have no choice but to engage. I exercise the freedoms I have. To write, to research, to walk wherever I wish to walk. To speak the names of birds. To consort with friends, in conversations on politics, citizenship and belonging. To believe in a society organized against the exploitation of all.

...

Who said feelings are historical? Emotions are as real as the mathematics applied to the science of machinery. Why is it okay to repress these emotions with drugs? These pharmaceutical companies have convinced people that their emotions are irrational--that is, not real. As if no context, historical or economic, exists to justify these emotions or, rather, radical action based on these emotions.

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