Reading Christopher Isherwood's diaries and "Down There on a Visit", from which one gets the impression, even greater than in Proust, of transposed genders. Less explicable is the extraordinarily dislikable nature of all the past acquaintances thinly disguised and included in these reminiscences. From the "Paul" section:
"Our friendship was of the sort which naturally evolves its own private jargon; ours was made up chiefly of misapplications of Augustus's favorite phrases. If we were late for a date with Augustus- who was particular about punctuality- Pual might exclaim, "Boy we'd better get over there with appalling instantaneity!" Hunting for the can opener in the kitchen, I would tell him, "I'm so near the thing which is so far from me."
and
"What shall I wear?" Paul wailed. We hesitated a long time between a sweater and jeans and a dark, formal suit with a tactful tie. If Paul wore the sweater and jeans he'd be putting himself on the level of all the underprivileged who couldn't afford to dress well and are therefore treated with prejudice, as likely criminals, from the start of the trial. Wouldn't this be the honorable thing to do? No, I argued- reminding him what Augustus had taught us, that you must never provoke anyone to commit an injustice against you. To wear the sweater and jeans would be lacking in charity to the judge."
Also was trying to defy what I thought might be an unfair prejudice, exploring science fiction with Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End
The only quotable part of Childhood's End "Nothing in Athens was done without a committee, that ultimate hallmark of the democratic method. Indeed someone had once defined the colony as a system of interlocking committees."
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