The people that meet her still have to walk backwards before her. This is because it is considered disrespectful to show her your back. But if all that protocol and history were abandoned, what would be left? Simply a woman who has inherited a position where she has no real power and no ability to express what she actually believes. I mean, she doesn’t make laws. Her ancestors used to, but they soon wised up to the fact that absolute power means you are the only person to blame when things go wrong.

  Nevertheless, the monarchy is not an outdated institution for England, because the English still believe in privilege. In England everyone knows their place. And everyone accepts that they cannot improve their place by working. It’s the exact opposite of America. In England, people who emerge from one class into another are despised. They are the rule-breakers. They are considered nouveau riche rather than rich. The French expression is used to make it more stylish, which is absurd, of course.

  One of the underappreciated benefits of the class system, however, is that everyone can stay where they are and complain about it. Complaining, like queuing, is a very English thing. In America, no one stays where he is. If he doesn’t like his situation, he changes it. He works hard, and he is praised because he has worked and gone from being a gardener to being a landowner. That’s what marks the difference between England and America. Anyone can be president, but no one else can be the Queen of England.

  Of course, the downside to the limitless upward mobility that exists in America is that, if you haven’t made it, you have no one to blame but yourself. It must be a terrible burden and one that the working classes of England will never be concerned with. It sounds absurd, of course, but it takes a lot of weight off people’s shoulders, I assure you.

  11. AUSTRALIANS

  I went to Australia in 1978 during what they call their winter. Whilst I was there they lamented, “Oh. You came during winter.” I said, “Don’t apologize. An Australian winter is better than an English summer.”

  There were flowers the size of table mats on the trees in Australia in winter. The air there is like diamonds. They lack nothing. I tried to discourage them from being a nation of ‘Madame Butterflies’, because they stand on the coast and wait for the wisp of smoke on the far horizon. They think it’s all out there, but I told them, “It’s all in here. You’ve got it all. You have the weirdest animals, but you can ignore them.”

  The Australians make wonderful films and write wonderful novels. The film called Picnic at Hanging Rock is a frightening movie, but it’s wonderful nevertheless. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a delightful and wounding movie. It’s infinitely better than the feeble film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, which was disneyfied and dismal. But Priscilla was raw, moving and incredibly real.

  Australians are more like Americans than they are like English people. They love England, but they hate the English. In a way, it’s similar to the way the English view the French and France. When I asked Australians what they liked about England, I never got a reply. But I decided that it was the littleness of England that appealed to them.

  Australia is so vast a country, though sparsely populated, that I consider its relationship with England to be like that between King Kong and Ann Darrow. I remember taking a companion to see the 1933 film, starring Ms. Wray[32] as Ann Darrow, and at that very dramatic moment when Ms. Ray lays gibbering across King Kong’s wrist, my friend, in a voice shrill with irritation, said, “I can’t think what he sees in her!” I suggested that what he saw in her was her littleness. Her fragility.

  I loved Australia. I saw all the great cities of its world except Darwin, which had been blown down a couple of years before on Christmas Day. A typhoon, as Mr. Conrad[33] calls it, came down from off the coast of Japan. Previously, they had never caught the Northern-Western coast of Australia, but on Christmas Day in 1974 ‘Cyclone Tracy’ hit Darwin.

  The Australians had never known a typhoon, and they went and hid in their cellars. When the typhoon passed, they came out and everything was calm. Then the typhoon came back and took the tops off all the houses! Darwin lost its nerve. Now it’s a city devoted to business and commerce, but no one will ever live there again. It’s a big town, the capital of the Northern Territory.

  I don’t think I want to live in Australia. They’re a maritime people. Everyone has his boat and stores it in Sydney, which has a harbor so enclosed that when Captain Cook sailed nearby, he didn’t recognize that it was a harbor and went straight past.

  And now there’s a bridge, perhaps the longest bridge in the world, across the harbor. And in the harbor are all the private boats of all the Australians. And they love to drink beer and sail their boats. That is their pastime. I think Australians resent the fact that England still regards them as a colony. They want to be free of that. One day, a Ghandi-style Australian will arise and protest, and England will give up Australia, and it’ll be a free country. Then there will be no more Queensland - how can there be without a Queen?

  Australia is vast. While I was there, I went from, I should think, Melbourne to Perth, over territory which gives you an impression there’s a road going from Melbourne to Perth. And it looks as though they could see Perth when they began to make the road - which would be impossible - because it’s absolutely straight. And halfway across there’s a turning to the right, which goes to Alice Springs, which is in the center of Australia.

  If your car broke down on the road from wherever you are to Perth, there would be nothing for you to do but to get out of the car, lie on the ground in the shadow of the car, and move when the shadow moved and wait. Because if you said, “I will go inland and see if I can get help,” there is nothing. There are no hedges, no pubs, no roads, no lakes, no rivers, no anything. There is just desolation.

  They once tried to counter the desolation with The Snowy River Project, which was a disaster. The Snowy River Mountains are in the south-east and someone said, “If we bomb the Snowy River, it will flow back into the interior and irrigate the land.” And they did just that, but the flow of the redirected river was simply absorbed by the desert.

  The other commonality between Australia and America is the similarity that exists between Australian Aborigines and Native Americans. I saw a number of Aborigines sitting outside of town halls while I was there. They looked forlorn and absolutely desperate. They have nothing. It has all been taken away from them, much like Native Americans. But I liked Australia a lot.

  12. PHILOSOPHERS and human beings

  Why is there something rather than nothing? I don’t know why. When I was at school, I was once on a bridge looking down into some water and, for a moment, the boy I was with and I imagined that we were looking down into the sky. I turned to him and said, “Supposing it were all sky?”

  “But why sky?” he replied.

  And for a moment, I thought. “That’s right. There could be nothing. Not even space! I don’t know why it’s there, I can’t explain it.”

  The boy felt frightened when he realized he was nothing. I too felt quite strange. I remember thinking, why? Why anything? And the whole world disappeared. And that was my first existential experience, I suppose.

  You see, the universe has no meaning and there was no purpose in my being born into it. I never listen to conversations which begin, “We are all put into the world for…” because we weren’t put into the world. We just happened and we have no purpose and that’s fine.

  Why such obvious statements seem to annoy other people, I don’t know. I was once talking in this way to a middle-aged housewife at a painting class in the suburbs and she said, “Even though life may have no meaning, I still don’t understand those people who take their own lives. Life may have no meaning, but it’s still very nice living it.”

  Her comment surprised me and I thought, I agree. Life doesn’t have to have a purpose. It’s still alright and for most people a lot better than the alternative.

  I suppose if your life has been hard, you’ve never had what you want, never had enough to eat and never had anywhere to live, you think, “Why am I here?” That must be terrible and frightening for most people. It’s no wonder the poor turn to religion. It gives them both hope and purpose.

  I don’t think I have any purpose however. I could give myself a purpose, if I like. I could say I am here to change the world, to make people better, but I really don’t believe that. I don’t feel driven to do anything. I simply live my life from day to day and I enjoy it. Most importantly, I can enjoy it without taking anything from other people that they don’t want to give. That to me is very important.

  To suggest we’re put on this earth with a purpose suggests that we have been put here by some force greater and wiser than ourselves. I don’t think that is true. I think we are entirely accidental, and once we have come to terms with that we just have to get through it somehow.

  Tabula rasa is a Latin phrase that is typically translated as ‘blank slate’. As a concept, it means we start out with nothing. Wordsworth[34], of course, did not believe that we start out with nothing. He said: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”

  In other words, he thought we brought with us some supernatural feeling at the very least, if not evidence of the purpose of life. But I don’t think life has any purpose. Instead, I think we just fill in the time between the cradle and the grave.

  The Earth is but one of an infinite number of planets. The notion that we are special is ludicrous. We are accidental, even though we were lucky enough to beat the odds to obtain life in the first place. On a related matter, I was once asked by a young gentleman, during my one-man show, if I believed in extraterrestrial life and I told him that I did. As I resident alien, how could I have said otherwise? But in truth, I can’t say that I do believe there is life out there.

  At another show I was asked by a lady what it means to be human. Having been asked this question, I was immediately sorry that I was not a scholar and had no philosophical point of view to express. More than that, since I do not regard myself as a real human being I find myself doubly unqualified to answer the question.

  Biologically, I am human. I know that. But what I have in common with the rest of the human race seems to end there. I lack the urgency and purpose that others seem to have. My sister reminded me, before she died, that she and my mother used to sit on either side of the fireplace in our family home, occupying themselves with knitting or else writing letters on their laps. I was a child, and merely lay on the rug between the two of them. Once an hour one of them would say, “Why don’t you get something to do?”

  And I would say, “Why should I?”

  This remains a question I cannot answer. Why should I have something to do?

  There is, of course, the theory that time is money and, as I have said elsewhere, I like money, though only to save it, never to spend it. It is an American theory, but its application means that while I am doing nothing I am not earning money, which is sad. But if I were rich, I would never do anything. I was once asked by a newspaper journalist, “If you suddenly had a million dollars, what would you do?” And I said, “Go to bed, and never get up again.” This was a great disappointment to the writer who posed the question, but idleness is my only occupation and people are my only hobby.

  If I regard what makes a thing human, and perhaps I was asked precisely because I am not a human being and therefore have a detached view of the subject, I would say it was a preoccupation with the idea of death. The reason why people do not live alone and do not spend hours doing nothing is because they can hear the time ticking by.

  Those who are not hopeless are worried that one day their life will end. But, if you live long enough, of course, you long for it to end. That’s been my desire in recent times. I only hope to become extinct. But before all that, you must try everything: have children, behave in such a way that monuments are built to you, rule the world, have streets and theaters named after you, and write your autobiography. These are ways to stay alive and this seems to be a preoccupation among human beings.

  If being human has any other special aspect it is that in every human being there are two people. One who does and one who sits in judgment on the other. The doing person acts irresponsibly, or nobly, or wisely, or foolishly, according to the mood or the situation. But inside him, further away, is an abstract spiritual being who never changes and who sits in judgment on him.

  This situation becomes evident when we hear people say, “I was ashamed of myself.” Who is ashamed of whom? It is this duality between the active living organism and the contemplative inner-self that sits in judgment that constitutes the whole human being. Upon greater reflection this is, I think, what constitutes a human being.

  13. MARRIED COUPLES

  When I was a young man, a great many married women told me their troubles. This led me to ask these unhappy creatures why they got married in the first place. They invariably told me: “I got married to get away from my mother and father.” If I inquired why, having flown the nest and found themselves in merely a different form of entrapment, they did not now leave their spouses, they would ask of me, “Where would I go?”

  Many long, dark years later, when a niece of mine, with no particular victim in mind, prophesized that she would one day marry, I couldn’t refrain from uttering an incredulous exclamation, “Why would you get married?” Her response was, “Everybody does.” Hers was a less tragic excuse, but hardly more sensible.

  These days neither of these answers is still relevant. A girl can leave home merely in search of adventure, and marriage is no longer a state into which every woman scrambles by any means whatsoever. This only makes it harder to understand why anyone at all enters into matrimony, least of all people who have flouted every other convention.

  I think it is all the fault of mothers. Even now, with George Bush’s[35] family values depreciating at an alarming rate, most people’s mothers are married. We can therefore safely assume that they have had rotten lives and all they want for their daughters are lives that are equally rotten. It’s only logical. Their sons they leave alone. They have already, reluctantly, learned from their husbands that men marry only when all is lost, when it is certain that the girl with eyes the size of saucers and red hair down to her waist will never arrive.

  Daughters are another matter. They are fair game. As such, mothers constantly threaten with such remarks as, “If you go around looking like that, you’ll end up alone.” I know that in polite families answering back is forbidden, but the only logical response to such admonitions is, “Yes, and thank God for that!”

  Luckily, the future is not as black as it might seem. The disastrous chain of events I have described will soon be broken. In the near future, everyone will be born in a little glass dish and will be looked after by a gentleman wearing rimless spectacles and a white coat, who not only utters no threats but who also never says, “And after all I’ve done for you…”

  No one can have happiness and marriage. Anyone who wants happiness must pursue it for its own sake. A woman must choose and, if she opts for matrimony, then forever after, however miserable she becomes, she must say to herself, “Well, I’m married.”

  When American newspapers first displayed photographs of Princess Diana above such captions as, “Is she happy?” I tried to explain that this was not the point. But I reckoned without the difference between the temperaments of England and America. In England, happiness has a bad name. There, the pursuit of happiness - which every American considers to be his right - is deemed to be a frivolous objective. The British do not want to be happy: they want to be right.

  Furthermore, royal marriages are political alliances, not personal unions. When Princess Mary’s[36] fiancé unexpectedly died, she simply married the next brother in line for the English throne. All that is required of a royal couple is to produce enough sons to secure the succession and to stand smiling beside one another at public ceremonies. After all, if they live in Buckingham Palace, they don’t have to see terribly much of each other anyway.

  The problem is altogether greater for married couples in England who live in humbler circumstances. I ask some of them how they manage to remain wise, witty, kind and beautiful for twenty-four hours a day. They giggle, but they don’t tell me, and yet this is the pertinent question. If a wife were ever to utter the words, “Oh, do shut up,” her marriage would be over. The phrase must surely run through her mind endlessly. But there it has to stay unless she wants to enter a convent. At least, that’s how it used to be.

  At ninety, I feel that the only thing that has changed in society is, of course, that marriage is admitted to be a failure. I recently saw a film in which a man said to a woman, “If you wanted monogamy, why didn't you marry a swan?” His point, of course, is that men are not suited to monogamy and this is perfectly obvious. Women go on as though men have only a certain number of erections in a lifetime, and if they wasted them on some other woman the wife would somehow be missing out.

  In reality, you can’t expect anyone to love you only, unless you consider yourself to be the wisest, wittiest, kindest, most beautiful, and wealthiest woman in the world. Women are full of delusions, but I can’t see that any of them believe that. So, what are they crying about? He found someone, temporarily or otherwise, that he likes better. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t like you. It’s just that he’s used to you. You’re no longer exotic. You’re no longer untamed.

  It’s because of the vow of marriage that a woman feels she has exclusive rights over her husband. Why make a vow of marriage? Why say you'll stick to one person only, when you really have no idea what else is out there. You’re not making an informed choice. I mean, people marry in their twenties and end up living to be seventy. That’s fifty years during which you’re stuck with the same person. It’s a terrible penance physically, emotionally, intellectually and sexually. How bored must they get? How boring must they be?