The very roughness of the journal seems to manifest the deep humanism of its author, which is informed by a touching passion for this benighted planet. At the same time, the gritty realism is relentless, with repeated fits of outrage, gloom and elation, rank vilification, adolescent umbrage and intense hatred. This is seasoned with an insistently Manichean world view, a melodramatic tendency to invest coincidences and trivialities with cosmic significance, a kind of manic-depressive romanticism and a highly selective focus on man-made misery.

The style, too, is a challenge. Ellis, in places, almost vanishes in baroque convolutions. He is a kind of anti-Hemingway, incapable of leaving a noun or a verb unqualified. Sometimes when Ellis is opining about current events, a note of ‘yea verily’ creeps in. This appears to be how sentences cohere in his mind; the problem is really one of insufficiently stringent editing. Ellis is far more persuasive when his inner wedding planner makes way for the perceptive and erudite mind, and lets the idea come to the page without all the tinsel and tulle.

Ellis invokes the sanguine fatalism of the Tralfamadorians, brought to human attention by Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s fictional character Kilgore Trout. These aliens have access to all of time at once. Since they can see everything coming, they understand that everything is predetermined, which leaves no room for grief, hope, tragedy, joy or surprise. ‘So it goes’ is the Tralfamadorian response to death, and presumably much else. Ellis is clearly attracted by the phrase’s nihilism. He returns to it endlessly throughout, stroking it like a talisman, along with a couple of other stock phrases: ‘just asking’; ‘or words to that effect’.

Contrary to its philosophical underpinning, Ellis deploys the extraterrestrial motif as a marker of mourning, disbelief and resignation. It is less an arrow in his quiver than a poppy in his lapel. But it is also a furphy: the mind of an Ellis does not in the least resemble the brain of a Tralfamadorian, as unmoved by tragedy as by the pull of gravity or the blackness of space. To such a sentience, these things simply are; they cannot be otherwise. At best, even the ending of the universe can only be marked, not lamented, by the signature phrase that captures this equanimity, ‘so it goes’.

In contrast, Ellis is highly sensitive to portents and pathos. He believes in beauty, immanence, value and the possibility of change. His repetition of the phrase may express a wish to feel these things less keenly an exhaustion from the emotional business of being Bob Ellis but it is not a reflection of any retreat into fatalism. Quite the opposite: Bob Ellis is Bob Ellis precisely because he suffers, and this suffering motivates, clarifies and gives meaning to his writing. In this and other respects he is no Trafalmadorian, but he is certainly our Vonnegut.

Ellis is anything but indifferent to death: it offends and outrages and intimidates him. It is soon apparent that our author’s rising anxiety about mortality and illness provide the logic of the book. His sensitivity to omen, his wild moodiness about events in the world, the venom of his judgements, even his joy at the demise of John Howard’s government: all are experienced by Ellis, and transmitted to us, with a knowledge of just how bereft one is when something ends.

This is linked to Ellis’s sense of waning relevance, of which examples abound. Although he was working for Nathan Rees when the member for Toongabbie became premier of New South Wales, in 2008, surprisingly little is said about the backroom machinations. This is because Ellis was not privy to them. Shortly after Rees’s elevation, Ellis notes the arrival in the new premier’s office of ‘a tall grey-eyed man, much respected apparently, called John Graham’. I happen to know John Graham, a widely liked and respected political talent, and I am surprised that Ellis had not heard of him before. To know many of the old guard in the arts and politics is a wonderful thing, but to know few of the coming men and women is clearly unnerving.

Ellis’s anxiety about the twilight feeds his fixation on death, with the usual fear of the void looming repeatedly as he attends funerals, frets about bullet wounds (not his), buries a beloved family pet, peruses obituaries and remembers fallen comrades. But Ellis’s deeper preoccupation goes well beyond this: it is about meaning and significance. When Ellis visits his old mate Steve J. Spears, who is dying of cancer in Adelaide, he is told on two occasions by the playwright that the ‘true, essential secret’ is that ‘nothing matters’. Ellis places the second revelation right after an eye-wateringly funny encounter which I won’t spoil, but which heightens the sense of existential absurdity. Ellis suffers an irrational fear of catching death and of the problem of extinction. But the twin of this anxiety is a heightened need to discover or even just to decree what constitutes meaning in his life. Fifty pages and one year on from Spears’s death in 2007, Ellis finds his hook. It is the defining passage in the book.

Ellis is riding the bus, ‘reading [Peter] Costello’s life, or [Peter] Coleman’s orchestration of Costello’s life, which is disappointing’. Ellis objects to the auto/biography, saying that he was ‘none the wiser at the end of it. [Costello] was a smirking, evasive enigma still … For he told us almost nothing of himself.’ Ellis goes on to list the things he would have liked to know that are not touched on in The Costello Memoirs (2008), such as growing up with Tim, Costello’s conversions (religious and political), ‘why he thought Christ anti-union’, and so on. In a remarkable paragraph, Ellis proceeds to list the sorts of things he still doesn’t know about Costello but that one ought to know about an autobiographer who is a potential prime minister; indeed, the sorts of things we know about Ellis himself, 407 pages into this long journey through these 501 nights.

We don’t know if he ever saw a movie, or went to a play, an opera, a ballet, read a novel or bet on the Melbourne Cup. We don’t know if he was raised tee-total, and what pain attended his first alcoholic drink. We don’t know if he had a pet dog, or a visiting parrot he befriended and fed. We aren’t told where he stood on apartheid, Nelson Mandela, Bobby Kennedy, the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Pogo, Peanuts, Pink Floyd. His grandparentage, parentage, childhood, school days, undergraduate years, adolescent comradeships and rapid marriage take between them twenty-two pages; the fight for the GST seventeen.

No great emotions trouble the rising young mover and shaker no lust, no fleshly disappointment, no drug-bust, no hangover, no detailed love of football team, no hot, rousing day at the cricket, no beloved eating house, no detail of how he first fell in love or felt at the sight of his firstborn. No thrill at first putting on a lawyer’s wig or walking at thirty-two into Parliament House.

The point of all this is not really the book: Ellis ends by upbraiding the member for Higgins for living a complacent, unemotional life. Ellis is convinced that the job of the biographer, especially the autobiographer, is to get to the messy, visceral, touching reality of life. More importantly, it is the job of all humanity to live this sort of life: it is the only sort of life that, for him, defies death. And it is just this sort of existence that we are privy to in the misnamed but deeply engaging And So It Went.

But if the title is off-kilter, the subtitle is dead-on: these are the nocturnal musings of one of our most interesting and eclectic thinkers. I have not come close to cataloguing his range of interests. Nor have I mentioned his encounters with luminaries great and small from politics and the other dramatic arts; or his ruminations on people he does not know or knows only slightly. The index is impressive, but as you read you realise it is only the half of it.

Ellis is like a magnificent dinner guest who adopts outrageous positions, discourses brilliantly and obstreperously, gets riotously drunk, opens your sole bottle of Grange, stays far too long, tells wonderful stories (more or less true) about famous and semi-famous and obscure people, quotes long passages (more or less accurately) from plays and speeches, celebrates life and laments its disappointments, felt keenly in his swelling heart. But you can also put him down for a few days and pick him up again when your strength has returned. And So It Went is heavy-going, even for fellow travellers, but it is always compelling, thoughtful and vigorous.