Experience (II).

In an arbitrarily pure world, then, or, more properly, a world which corresponds entirely to the set of values encoded in my own mind, there would be a clear demarcation between the domains of fact and not-fact.

To attain this, it is not enough for a newspaper, say, to clearly delineate the parts given over to news from those given over to comment or features. If an entirely new language is not required, then a new paradigm with a shorter leash is the minimum to be hoped for.

Is it the role of the journalist to insinuate (within a news story) that Barack Obama might face diplomatic pressure to relinquish his Nobel Prize; to assert that Silvio Berlusconi is just another sickening chip off the old block of Italian politics; to print specific allegations relating to the sexual conduct of Roman Polanski?

It's pernickety and naive to claim there should be laws against this sort of thing. The downtrodden journalist already has the boot of litigation close to his teeth and always ready to swing back, especially in England, the libel capital of the world.

Furthermore, the dream (I had) of rooting in the hard earth with my fingers to reveal uncomfortable truths is quickly obliterated by the pressure of deadlines. I dare say I'm more free, sitting here tapping away in a chair, than almost any journalist alive.

Is the death of entertaining copy in the Press a price worth paying for a greater dose of the truth? Or is the realm of facts - uncontestable ones - of such limited application that we'd end up with newspaper headlines like:

• THREE SQUARED NINE, CLAIMS PALIN
• GOALLESS GAME ENDS GOALLESS: BOTH TEAMS DRAW
• MICHAEL JACKSON - ARTIST

In my well-sifted, filtered world, the license of creativity is awarded only to those who have turned their backs on the brutal, unforgiving desire to arrive at an unambiguous truth, expressed in the absence of convoluted literary language. Thus, Milan Kundera can write about a fictitious house in a real city in what used to be the real Czechoslovakia, occupied by the fictitious Tomas and Teresa, who are themselves layers of inviolable truth, subjective elements based on the truth, and partially a literary device, created in Kundera's imagination.