William Golding Journal Extract

William Golding’s Journal

All these considerations taken together make it most likely to my mind that ‘messing about in boats’ replaces or perhaps is a psychic journey. This is surely why so many people have boats at moorings and hardly ever use them but want to think of them as there. What waves wash, what tides and currents and deep darknesses have surrounded our unrecorded history! The amnion holds a Mediterranean sea in which a foetus floats, at home as any of the small glittering things we inspected through our snorkels.

The Old People feared the sea. Perhaps they were too close to it and had to fight to preserve an ego against the waves and storms of the unconscious. The New People used it; but I see now that it was not for nothing that my sense of fitness sent Tuami and the others sailing away across a mysterious lake. More than that it is clear to me that Pincher is suspended in the depths of his own unconscious. It is better to suffer in the unconscious than not to have one.

Flies, Inheritors, and Pincher were written in the interstices, crevices, cracks of a teacher’s life: and what is more, a teacher who had nowhere private to go. What matters is having something to say. If you have that, nothing can prevent you saying it.