“From one of my favourite short stories:
No, I won’t get them that cup, even though the stupid tash-twitching-bastard has all his hopes in me. Because what does his barmy hope mean? I ask myself… It don’t mean a bloody thing to me, only to him, and it means as much to him as it would mean to me if I picked up the racing paper and put my bet on a hoss I didn’t know, had never seen, and didn’t care a sod if I ever did see. That’s what it means to him. And I’ll lose that race, because I’m not a race horse at all, and I’ll let him know it when I’m about to get out - if I don’t sling my hook even before the race. By Christ I will. I’m a human being and I’ve got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn’t know is there, and he’ll never know what’s there because he’s stupid. I suppose you’ll laugh at this, me saying the governor’s a stupid bastard when I know hardly how to write and he can read and write and add-up like a professor. But what I say is true right enough. He’s stupid, and I’m not, because I can see further into the likes of him than he can see into the likes of me. Admitted, we’re both cunning, but I’m more cunning and I’ll win in the end even if I die in gaol at eighty-two, because I’ll have more fun and fire out of my life than he’ll ever get out of his. He’s read a thousand books I suppose, and for all I know he might even have written a few, but I know for a dead cert, as sure as I’m sitting here, that what I’m scribbling down is worth a million to what he could ever scribble down. I don’t care what anybody says, but that’s the truth and can’t be denied. I know when he talks to me and I look into his army mug that I’m alive and he’s dead. He’s as dead as a doornail. If he ran ten yards he’d drop dead. If he got ten yards into what goes on in my guts he’d drop dead as well - with surprise. At the moment it’s dead blokes like him as have a whip-hand over blokes like me, and I’m almost dead sure it’ll always be like that, but even so, by Christ, I’d rather be like I am - always on the run and breaking into shops for a packet of fags and a jar of jam - than have the whip-hand over somebody else and be dead from the toe nails up. Maybe as soon as you get the whip-hand over somebody you do go dead. By God, to say that last sentence has needed a few hundred miles of long-distance running. I could no more have said it at first than I could have took a million-pound note from my back pocket. But it’s true, you know, now I think of it again, and always has been true, and always will be true, and I’m surer of it every time I see the governor open that door and say Goodmorning lads.” - Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (via notsoterriblymisanthropic)
See original: "From one of my favourite short stories:
No, I won’t get them that cup, even though the stupid..."
