i do not think it matters

You're going home tomorrow.

2005-12-15T00:20:13Z

You discover that the source of a strange odor people have been noticing in your room—but as of yet have not identified—cigarettes? coffee? rotting fruit?—is actually cigarettes, coffee, and spoiled milk. You notice that the person whom you’ve been staring at, is staring at you. While you’re reading Bruno Schulz, a small black kid in an enormous coat—yes, black, is it wrong that the first thing you notice about a black kid at LC is that he’s black?—walks past you singing, under his breath, “I’m a Barbie girl”—you look up—he stares at you, deadpan, keeps singing, until he cracks a smile out of you, then walks away. (And it’s been a bad day, so you know he has talent.) You check your e-mail. Your friend M. tells you about a detailed and surreal dream he had about your clitoris. You wonder, in the middle of a class, if any of this is real or if everyone around you is just a robot, or a dream—and are hit, out of nowhere, with a painfully nostalgic memory of the one person with whom you could discuss these theories with any degree of seriousness. You remember lying on a sidewalk in Cambridge, dropping pennies down a grate to see how deep it was. (It was deep.) You take two small white pills—so small, it’s hard to take them seriously—that allow you to tell yourself, Today will be fine. (Repressing the cynicism is half the battle.) You walk outside at 7 a.m. in a tee shirt, just to wake yourself up when the cold knocks the wind out of your lungs, and wonder if anyone else notices that the snow in the morning is yellow and blue. Your arm gets sore from erasing blackboards. You wonder if you should exercise more. Hendo asks, “So if you throw back a bottle of Jack Daniels, go speeding down the highway, and manage not to kill anyone—then you’ve done nothing wrong?” You say, “Well, yeah!” You check your e-mail—again. You throw open the door across the hallway from yours and demand that your friend J. explain to you just what it is about milk that makes it smell so bad, and shouldn’t it evaporate, eventually, and will it act as fertilizer for the houseplant you’ve been pouring it into? She gives you a weird look. (Science is so confusing.) You put your hair up, you take your hair down, you get to class three minutes late. You drink your fifth cup of black coffee. You feel your hands shake. You walk with awkward, miniature steps across an icy part of the pavement. You wonder if people are looking at you strangely. You fall asleep during physics. Shit. You worry about your future happiness. You contemplate your Psychology teacher’s theory that a prep school’s emphasis on sports is an attempt to rechannel repressed teenage sexual energy. You sit at a table and listen to people talk—about—absolutely—nothing—for hours. (You worry about your future happiness.) You rearrange the piles of books that are gradually taking over your living space. You write to-do lists on neon post-it notes, and learn to ignore them. You blow your last dollar bill on—Pop Tarts? You give your bed a wistful look, then pop another big yellow caffeine pill. You take pictures of yourself on your digital camera, from various angles, then delete them. You have a lot of work to do. You stay awake until 2 a.m. writing a short story before starting your English paper. Your computer eats it alive, and you spend two more hours re-typing everything, trying not to let despair overwhelm you. You eat an entire bag of Swedish fish and two cans of soda within an hour. You go downstairs and buy another Sprite. You spend more time washing your hands than could really be called necessary, and realize you haven’t had time to think in a while. You look in the mirror and realize that for the rest of your life, you’re trapped in that same body. Twinge of boredom. You’d like—you’d love—a cigarette, or two, or fifteen. You think about death, and feel kind of embarassed for the rest of the day. You call your mom and listen to her talk—about—absolutely—nothing—for hours. You try to remember how your room at home smells. You try to remember how you could possibly have been the same human being before you had your left eyebrow pierced. You try not to take yourself seriously. You repress the urge to scream at someone, to physically attack someone, to confide everything in someone, to be completely fucking honest with someone, to hug someone who might be a little disturbed by the gesture, to pin someone against a wall and bite his face, to kick someone in the shin. You watch the squirrels in the tree outside your window, for a long time. You avoid making eye contact with someone, then stare at him when you’re pretty sure he isn’t looking. You think of the title of a movie you’ve been wanting to see for three years, then forget it again. You stand outside your neighbor’s door and listen to her speak Bulgarian on the phone. You smile, in passing on your way down the stairs, at someone whom you really dislike but pretend to like. You sit in a chair between someone’s office and some lockers, and try to read Invisible Man, but listen to two girls talking instead. You talk about how tired you are, or how high you are, or how excited you are at the prospect of something that will happen in the near future. You wait for something to be over so that you can wait for something else to be over.

ithinkitmatters @ 2005-10-22T12:52:00

2005-10-22T17:12:12Z

I wish I had a thermometer.

For the life of me I have no freaking clue if I'm actually sick or if I'm imagining it. Or making myself sick.

Creepy.

________

Trainspotting is an awesome movie which I recommend to tous et toutes. It seems that the one rule of movies—the one thing you just don't put in a movie—is a dead baby. You see every other gruesome thing imaginable—but the dead baby rule is a line you just don't cross. That's just sick. I have a huge amount of respect for Trainspotting's total rejection of the Dead Baby Rule. That's just badass. The baby dies, and do they tip toe around it and bow down to the rule about dead babies? Fuck no. They show you that dead baby. They give you a close-up on the dead baby for a good four or five seconds. And overall, it is a damn good movie. Ewan McGregor + lots of Scottish accents + violence and heroin ... damn good movie.

________

Going home next weekend to look into getting hooked up with some prescriptions. How exciting, it's like Christmas. The headache is still going on—except it's moved to my whole body—and my motivation to do anything worthwhile with my time has shriveled up and died. I'm going to go lie down now.

I miss me some speed real bad.

2005-10-21T21:15:33Z

All I really want is to sit in a warm car for two hours, go home, sleep, eat, and get so high I will not even be thinking about anything except how fucking cool the sky looks. However ... I'm staying on campus for another fucking weekend because if I don't go to the city on Sunday ... well then I will have gone way way way too long on that weird muted volume where I'm doing nothing but bracing myself and waiting for things to be over. Good grief I miss the city. I miss people and noise and walking and exploring and ... how everything is open to you, this whole network. So I guess what I'm saying is that a day of that is not only worth having to stay on the island, it's necessary, I don't do things because I enjoy them anymore, I do things to survive, my resources are getting low, this is necessary.

I've had a headache for forty-eight hours.

________

L'enfer, c'est les autres.

Here's a good question that no one in human existence has answered yet: Why do the people you depend on suck so much?

________

On the big sin curve of illusion and disillusionment that you spend your whole life going up and down on — I am so sooo deep in disillusionment. Or is it illusion? Maybe being disillusioned is when you're really happy—when you don't need your illusions, you know that you're happy and that things are good. And I am thinking about chemicals, still.

I miss being hugged.

Have I mentioned that headache? It doesn't go away. It slides around. One minute it's my entire skull, the next it's a random dime-sized spot just over my left eye. When I touch my head, that also hurts. Pretty fucking weird, right?

________

I'm being easier on myself than usual by writing a really angsty livejournal entry. Mother fucker.

I WANT TO TELL EVERYONE THAT I MISS ALL OF YOU. DO YOU GET IT??

________

Mr. Kosanovich wears argyle socks every day, and they always match his outfit.

I remember that this is one of the first things he told my Acting I class way back in sophomore year.

(Sophomore year—happened. Good. grief. Good: grief! Good, some grief. haha. Weird.)

________

If I had access to it, I might like to take Adderall all the time. This would be what we call a BAD IDEA, such as licking a frozen flagpole. Or frying yourself out on speed.

I liked my drugged-up personality. But it couldn't only have been the drugs. Life was too fucking sweet. I need to be back in college. I need substance abuse and intelligent people, long walks to go on at 3 am and being treated like a grown-up and making decisions and being held accountable. I miss going places. I miss MAKING THINGS and DOING THINGS. I miss that constant, unspoken push to be slightly more open-minded, instead of the brainwashing oppression of CONFORMITY you see here.

AFTER ALL NONE OF THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING. Yes it is.

Did I mention that headache.

C-Love's Guide to COLLEGE

2005-10-21T01:52:03Z

After all the bullshit, this is the wisdom I've acquired.

Taking a gap year is better than going to Haverford just because it's the only place you got into, so why the fuck would you even think about applying there.

Going to a cool city for four years is just as good as going to a cool college for four years.

Going to college in the middle of fucking nowhere is not worth it, no matter how cool the professors/students/trees are. Unless that college is Oberlin.

I may never see any of you again anyway, my loyalties are flexible, if you matter at all you will get on a plane, so geographical constraints have officially been taken down.

________

Maybe I don't want to see any of this again anyway.

Like an amnesia case playing solitaire in a hospital.

I can induce tears by paring things down to the thing I'm scared to think about, finding the exposed nerve and touching it over and over again, it's an analytical process, it's also a struggle uphill against your own mind, how do you make your mind think the things your mind won't let itself think? Well it's pretty damn hard, let me tell you.

Anti-depressants: good or bad? We have two out of two voting YES, wait, shouldn't there be some opposition—somewhere—wasn't that always the unspeakable option, the non-option. Well, then you get HERE where you're trying very hard to lead a nice little monastic lifestyle of studying and meditating and smiling out at the world because it's all just an image on a screen, projected from nowhere, anyway—the only hitch in this nice little life you'd had laid out for yourself is you know it's all horribly, horribly wrong. There's so much of life you are missing out on and it's almost unbearable—almost—it's just an endurance test and maybe mind-numbing drugs would be just enough stamina. Oh geezus I'm so wrong about this.

Fuc-c-c-k-k. . . .

Because if I have enough stamina on my OWN of course I shouldn't depend on outside, chemical forces. Please note however that I just used the word "should" which means that that is not my own opinion at all, it's this weird conscience Superego deal I'm trying to get rid of altogether, I'm always trying to get rid of. There is no "should."

Fuck it.. I want drugs. I want numbness. Fuck metaphysical purity. I don't want to go an entire day without moving or looking anyone in the face because my brain is so crushed under this weird—this weight twisting around in there, whose origin I do not control.

I want to do this without drugs because I think that it might just make me stronger, in any case, I want to find out. In the meantime I want less criticism and interference. If I pull out a razor blade or start killing myself somehow, then interfere, in the meantime, just don't just don't just don't. Please.

Thank you.

Goodnight.

There isn't ever anything to say to somebody who has found out the truth about himself

2005-10-19T20:27:59Z

Oh how I miss people who get me and are thinking the same thing, at the same time, however many hundreds of miles away.

To hell with them all, I said impartially under the stars. They all looked alike to me then. And I looked like them.

Synesthesia

2005-10-14T02:31:47Z

I like spending hours completely alone.

I went upstairs to the third floor of Founders today. I really love that hallway, I have a soft spot for that hallway. I like how long and shadowy it is. I like how every little room has a window and a piano and perfectly white walls and smells like old carpeting and old wood. And oh God I love music, I was forgetting how good it feels to have air come out of your chest and turn into a sound. The sensation is under-rated, what it feels like to infinitesimally change one muscle in your stomach or your finger or your lips and make a different sound that is completely disconnected from you and yet feels completely connected to you; or how seeing a black dot resting between the two highest lines on the staff makes your left thumb, first, second, and third, and right first and second fingers go down, there is no intermediary processing in the brain that tells you that that dot is an E and that E means those particular fingers, it's just the dot and your fingers, they talk to each other, it is synesthesia. There are sounds that are linked to specific muscular operations, some obscure muscle fiber at the corners of your mouth that you don't even notice, but that you only make by thinking that the sound should be darker, or bigger, or sadder, and those are things that you do not know the particular muscular operations to perform in order to achieve, but somehow your lungs and your mouth just do them for you, when you make yourself hear in your head how the sound should be.

I like to think about ideas very abstractly. (I love calculus, I hate physics. I love psychology, I hate science.) Which is why I have problems writing stories. I am awful at making plots. So my project is to write a story every day. And maybe put them here, to prove that I'm not just full of shit. And so that I'll actually write them.

The people who are still your gods

2005-10-12T13:20:27Z

even when you've realized — much more thoroughly than is even necessary — that they are really, really human. ONCE they were just these entities whom I was in total awe — total lustful hero-worship of. And then I get the benefit of getting closer, finding all their weak spots, the things they think about when they can't sleep, and they actually become someone else — so much more real, so much less perfect, and I don't know whether I'm disillusioned by it, or if it only makes them better.

Here's the thing though, some of my friends are so brilliant that I just can't shake the whole idolotry thing I had for them before we became friends and I found out that they're just people, like me.

They are so brilliant.

Ca m'étonne — et ça me plait beaucoup — que je suis leur amie. Eux, qui sont si doués, m'apprecient et je ne peux que me demander pourquoi — et je n'ai aucune idee qu'est-qu'ils font avec moi, pourquoi ils ne voient pas combien je ne mérite pas le temps qu'ils passent avec moi — mais la raison ne change pas la chose. Enfin, moi aussi, je suis douée car quelqu'un qui a ces gens dans sa vie a vraiment de la chance. Sometimes I feel like Nick, to their Gatsby — the story is not about me, but somehow I'm really needed, and I will probably be around for their deaths, it would only be appropriate.

Here is what I learned from Max last night. EVERYTHING is at your disposal — all these little things, every experience, every sensation, every relationship between two objects, are all fresh resources, that can be broken down into little pieces. The problem is, we get so many ready-packed ideas, so many formulas for the way we speak and the way we see the world, that we get stuck, when really it's much cheaper and easier to just re-evaluate what's around you — you could be stranded in a little room with just a few objects and never run out of different ways to look at them. It's overwhelming, how everything is there as your resource, which is why you need some structure and technique, just to process it all, but never despair just open your eyes and re-define what's allowed to be inspiration.

(Il me manque beaucoup.

Et j'aime bien comment le passé et le présent se mélangent, à des moments comme cela. C'est comme il m'a dit: pour lui, le temps n'est plus linéaire, il continue à vivre des temps qui sont dejà passes et ces moments là ne sont pas moins réels que le moment actuel — ce qui est pour moi la seule chose qui est réel — au moins, ce que je crois d'être "réel" — enfin c'est n'importe quoi.)

fixations on memories and cigarettes

2005-10-11T01:27:50Z

So I was going through this little notebook I started about 10 days before THE DEPARTURE, and kept up for a couple of weeks over the summer. I wrote some pretty, crappy things that I proceeded to forget about entirely. Here they are, in chronological pieces ranging over about a month—a period of post-traumatic shock and strange ways of killing time.

The right choice was not you, and you could have called it before you were told, donc, rien n'est si grave que ca. This is just a room with ugly strangers and friends you hate, duty-free alcohol and overweight white Americans in button-downs and sunglasses, metal benches, vaulting metal ceilings that suggest the future and your imminent plunge into metal and space, noise and gray lights. Returning home is uglier than leaving was. I'm choking on air. I've never hated anything so much. Get the fuck away from me, get the fuck away from me, get the fuck away.

[ I wrote this at the airport lobby. I guess I was pissed. ]

This is the strangest place I think I've ever seen, this place where I grew up. Every image is offensive, I want to shut them all out before they take the place of what I really want to remember. But when will I stop feeling sick? When will I be set six hours back and be able to fall asleep at night? Who was it that said the coming home is harder than the leaving?

What will become of you now that it's all over?

The smell of smoke and the city is fading from the fibers of my hair and clothes, the mark of the ten-pm sun is paling from more forehead. How — how could it be left so far away??

You are weightless a mile off the ground, the air isn't air, it's just a sucking sound in plastic tubes. People cry, people kiss, people drink whisky and porto from the bottle and cheap champagne from plastic cups. People sleep on other people's shoulders, peoplewrite messages on other people's skin. The descent is starting; the descent hesitates, makes a circle, redescends. We touch the ground. We are informed to keep our seatbelts on.

At the Thabor on the very last day, I tried to savor it, tried to preserve it so it would last me at least the first, hardest days. The smell of the flowers; the grass under my back, the sun in my face, the downward slope of the lawn, the joint in my hand, the people on either side of me, the music playing on somebody's laptop. Walking alone; walking with someone; drinking beer in the shade, watching the swans. Passing so many hours; people come, people leave, the sun moves. See your friends walking up from far away before they see you. Call them over.

[ I remember the song "Champagne Supernova" by Oasis came on, and the words "where were you while we were getting high?" playing right as someone passed me a joint. It was cute. ]

The city. The cafes, the people moving. The big open spaces with soaring stone buildings and a clock-tower dead center.

I am stale coffee and cigarettes, writing the story of how things were. I am kind — a rare breed — I am universally likeable. Something so, so odd about analyzing yourself from outside your own body. I am the most likely to have an out-of-body experience — I've yet to experience that one. I remind you of the Virgin Mary.
I find television more tolerable with the volume on mute. I find my mother more tolerable when I watch her mouth move without listening to the cut-off-from-reality garbage coming out. Who am I to judge.
(I'm the fucking Virgin Mary.)
Must keep reminding myself I'm not in prison here. I get the feeling I don't love my mother anymore. For everything I hate about him, I love at least listening to my father speak.

[ Things people told me about me, like that I remind them of the Virgin Mary — in fact I've been told that numerous times, it makes me laugh more every time it comes up. ]

Fuck the night — things are frightening in the light of day. I'd take pounding narrow, winding roads, not going so fast but feeling like we are, windows wide open to let the white frost air of our headlights surge in as the hill summets and we suddenly plunge, my hand cutting the fast cold air like waves—like water—and the music vibrating down to our metal core, and no other signs of life for miles, except the occassional deer — I'd take any night like that over the hours of the day that stretch and stretch against our will while we wait for them to extinguish. Sure I'd take the sunlight pouring down into my upturned face and washing it like acid, but I'd sooner have the uneasy glow of moonlight turning us all black and white.
We get truthful late at night as the chance to confess runs out — who knows when we'll find ourselves again this intimate, the last ones still awake, facing each other cloesely, propped on elbows? Is it being tired that makes the words pour out so easily, or that once we start, we won't sleep until it's finished? Are we less ashamed with our faces obscured by the dark, no eyes, no consequence, no identity, just voices? It's when we should be dreaming, when we permit ourselves thoughts like these, repressed memories, dark stories. The atmosphere is dark too — it feels less absurd to talk about our fears and secrets, things we shouldn't have done. We strip ouselves down layer by layer and the darkness is enough cover, we're revealed and not ashamed. We can lisen without responding. The truth doesn't matter — it is what it is — is anything really shocking the hour before sunrise?
During the day you need a pretty face — at night you can be the monster you really are. Such a sweet, romantic quality to the shifting in night and day.

[ I don't really know what's going on here. I smoked a lot of pot at the beginning of this summer. ]

Why don't you go write something? Used to do shit like that.

[ Note to self... ]

So this is what they mean. The death-urge of living in a small town. Having been away for so long it's like culture shock, you can't imagine how you were once like these people— not knowing if you'd ever get out — you don't even have a drug dealer. The superiority complex. Everyone who didn't leave — everyone who isn't you, that is — is really a stupid fuck. (Oh yeah? So why did you come back, then? Just morbid curiosity? Oh no, it's more than that, but you'll never admit it to yourself, because as soon as you do, there will be that doubt in your head, that hesitation, that fear that you'll never get away for good.)
Still, you have the summer. You have lying on the grass with ants crawling over your legs, getting a suntan. You have your memories of wandering around Bayeux with a harmonica and a joint — it was hot out then, too, wasn't it? You have blinding heat shining in a six-foot-high current over the black parking lot as you leave a dark movie theatre. You have the car, you have the drinks, you have all night with nothing to do.

The reason that I had so few emotions left — that I could barely cry — is the black death I vomited after roaming around with various bottles of alcohol, hardly aware that I was walking. The benefit of having the plastic bucket was that I got to be lying sprawled on the floor as death came pouring out, I didn't even have the relative control of kneeling over a toilet. I didn't even have to lift my head off the ground.
And then I was numb, an emotional cinderblock as a piece of me got torn out and left behind — because I'd already experienced that emotional agony physically, expelling my liver in heaving convulsions.

Cigarettes and coffee in the morning, in the sunlight but before I'm even fully awake, sitting outside alone, will forever remind me of that cliff in Provence overlooking the Mediterranean soaring up over the rocks. That to me was peace, that to me was the most beautiful place on earth, a few minutes alone and hours ahead to spend, places to see with my greatest friends, the people who made me feel like me — cities, rivers, sunlight. Before the day even starts. We have everything to ourselves. This was loving life and not having to trust or doubt that anything will ever be as perfect; there is no need for the future in times like that, that make everything you've ever lived worthwhile and perfect if it was meant for nothing more but to bring you here. What wouldn't I give to relive one second of having someone's eyes and hands on me permanently, downing cheap rose from the tap by the pitcher, never having the adequate minutes to say or do everything that should be said or done with people who love me, but knowing every second that I am loved and letting that be enough to smile broadly and constantly? How could we ever have left?

And it sort of goes on like this. I'm so angsty and full of myself and romantic sometimes it makes me giggle.

the life and death instinct essay

2005-10-10T05:02:58Z

Life is time-consuming and I have so many ideas. So many—do you understand??

I have lots of projects. I'm working on a bunch of plays. A bunch, as in three. I have a really fucking decent idea for a novel, but the problem is, writing requires thinking time, not just sit-at-your-desk-writing time, but good, quality, go for a walk in the woods, sit on a bridge and look at the water, lie in bed for three hours staring at the ceiling before you fall asleep, thinking time. I don't have much of that.

I'm reading All the King's Men for my English class. I'm reading a play or two a week for my playwriting class. I'm reading James Hillman's A Blue Fire because I'm in love with psychology and Doc Failla. I'm scribbling down lots of ideas, and lots of quotations of people with better ideas than me, and somehow it all pulled together in this essay I ended up writing tonight because I couldn't say everything I've been wanting to say in something called a "reflection."

I'm re-learning how to draw and re-learning that I love art. Nelly and I sit in the hallway and play with pastels. She makes art, I make chicken shit on a page, it's all good and it's really, really nice. I'm remembering that sensation you get when you're really focused on a drawing and your Right-brain is going hyper-crazy—everything you say if you try to have a conversation with Nelly at the same time that you're drawing, talking without pausing or looking up, comes out sounding very nice. Talking has a nice quality; talking out of the wrong side of your brain. Also nice, is the effect it has on slowing down time.

(It's getting dark really fucking early and sometimes I feel like the world is a collapsible box that's closing and I get scared.)

I switched into Math I Understand class, and it's fun and interesting without the stress level of an eighteen-hour emergency room shift that was my BC calculus class. I miss it, I really do, but it's nice to actually finish homework before four a.m.

I'm writing essays and starting to get scared because there are less than three weeks to go. Less-than-three-weeks is that awkward time quantity that you always make yourself believe is "a lot" but actually, no, it isn't, because in a few days you will only have two weeks, and we all know that two weeks is aboslutely fucking nothing.

My dad is about to commence Part II of The Greatest Legacy He Could Ever Leave Me as my mother has baptised it. Which basically means, we're one chapter closer to the part where he's really going to die one of these days and the decision hasn't come in yet whether I am ever going to be okay with that if things keep going the way that they're going. Which basically means, I should be at home right now. Which basically means, I should stick around this summer—which means hopefully that will come soon enough. (Which means once again, life is time-consuming and time is really being unfriendly to me right now—I should be very worried, but since it's been hanging over my head since the day I was born, even though the threat is on an upward spike, I'm desensitized to it, and there's no point in un-desensitizing myself right now. Whatever happens, happens.)

(Someday I will write a really fantastic essay on the etymology, usage, and meaning of the word "should" because I know that it's a totally bullshit word, but I haven't been able to stop using it yet, like I haven't been able to stop using "God" as part of my everyday vocabulary yet.)

Other projects ... everything that is college-involved. Unfortunately I haven't had time to play with my flute since I've been here, so at this point I might be better off using a recording I made three years ago to submit to colleges. There's also the question of all these friggin' dates and appointments with people, filling out forms, remembering dead-lines. It sucks.

There are books. There are enough books that, if I really wanted to, I could re-enact the death sentence of that guy who was crushed to death under rocks over the course of several days after being tried as a witch in Salem in the seventeenth century. Damn, metaphors are cool.

Other projects include sleeping and eating, complaining about the sleeping and the sex I haven't been doing lately, going to classes, being forced against my will to interact with dumb people who waste the time I don't really have. *sigh* Okay, there are people who are worth my time. I would tell the Pope to shut up so I could take a call from Madeline or Anastacia. And Nelly makes my world go round, and there are a few other exceptions, like Hannah whom I might as well name since she's the only one potentially reading this at the time I'm writing it. There is Doc Failla. There is Mr. Kasonovich. There are all the people I'll never really stop missing, because they represent a time in my life that's over and that the present just can't live up to, however hard it (doesn't really) try to.

________

Eros and Thanatos
a response

Seminar on Freud and Jung, Doc Failla
10/10/05

All of life, the entire scope of human perception, could be defined as the relationship between the mind and the outside world. “Really,” reality is only what we happen to believe (due to our own faith, or the influence of other people’s convictions) to be all around us —who knows what is really out there? Because man is contained essentially to his own mind, his comprehension of the world is bounded by what that tool allows him to perceive—so to say that any person is able to see, absorb, process, and analyze all the world, in its every aspect, is completely illogical and arrogant, it’s only safe and logical to assert. It’s not hard to prove the fact that what we believe and what is are two different things. According to something as inconsequential as a shift in mood, the world can seem at one moment bright, kind, and fortuitous—and at the next, dark, oppressive, and hopeless. So which of these views is “right”? Probably neither, because no matter how objectively and open-mindedly we try to view the world, our perspective is always clouded by subjectivity. It is impossible not to see the world through the lens of memory and experience, and since no two people will have exactly the same one, it can only be presumed that each individual has his own version of Reality; perhaps these individual visions are the only Reality.

Our sense of the world is further distorted by the strong desire to believe that we understand it perfectly, that everything around us matches the picture of it we’ve formed in our own mind—thus we start bending the truth in order to better conform it to our own sense of “logic”—we explain, we assume, we rationalize. We digress from the truth, and thereby neglect the important fact that every truth we’ve so carefully (or carelessly) arrived at in our heads should be open to constant and biting scrutiny.

We turn to the perceptions of others to help us build a more complete picture of what’s around us, but these accounts are hardly communicable in their entirety, and thus even less trustworthy than our own perceptions—something is always lost in translation, in the conveyance of one person’s sensual conceptions to another’s, whether through art, language, or any other form of communication. And even if I could “read your mind,” per se, why should I trust your perception to be deeper or more complete than my own? And if yours should happen to corroborate mine, who’s to say that this isn’t mere coincidence? Every one of us may be equally blind. And maybe, all of this is nothing more than “a shared dream we agreed to call Reality.”1

In the end, in interpreting reality we are left on our own, with nothing but our faith, doubts, illusion, and projections. There are no axioms upon which to construct a logical, cohesive, proof of an absolute truth—only whatever we happen to believe, with the fullest of our convictions.

As far as our respective inner worlds—the psyche—it’s plausible that we’re also completely ignorant as to their “reality.” As unnerving as it is, psychology and even modern neuro-science suggest that we do, in fact, engage only a small percentage of our brain capacity. In fact, the proof is everywhere that we understand little (in dreams, repressed memories, moments of confusion or epiphany). Thus sanity is only a measure of how tightly-woven, how water-proof, and how conforming your vision of reality is. If it holds together; if you believe it; and if other people are buying your story, too; then you are, according to the textbooks, totally and reassuringly sane.

However, sanity should not be mistaken as synonymous with the ability to comprehend the mind and control its thoughts. Freud proved to us, in what he called the third Narcissistic blow that the mind “is not even master in its own house.”2 Essentially, the problem with understanding the human mind is that our only tool to understand it is the mind itself. An analogy for the futility of understanding one’s own mind could be the paradox of trying to define a word without using that word in its definition. Thus, until we understand the mind, we can never use it to understand the mind—and because this cycle never ends, we will never be able to understand the mind.

The closest we come in understanding the mind is to define a few of its paradoxes. Freud gave the contradictory forces that are the human psyche an overaching set of names: Eros and Thanatos.
In his book War is a Force that Gives Us Maning, Chris Hedges defines Eros as the “instinct, the impulse within us that propels us to become close to others, to preserve and conserve” and Thanatos as the “death instinct, the impulse that works towards the annihilation of all living things, including ourselves.” On these two conflicting forces, Freud wrote, “This struggle is what all life essentially consists of.”

Hedges’ chapter “Eros and Thanatos” focuses on the intimacy existing between two seemingly mutually-excluding tendancies in human nature. Presenting the greatest paradox of human existence, he writes, “And this is what war often looks and feels like, at its inception: love.” It is easy to understand why love is a driving force in life; biologically, emotionally, and spiritually, it is the magnetic pole towards which we gravitate. When we introduce the concept of Thanatos, the concept of Yin and Yang comes to mind: without white there could be no black, and without black, there could be no white. Analagously, love cannot exist without its counterpart of hate; without Thanatos there would be no Eros. But how can we explain the allure, the instinctive pull towards death and destruction, which seems so counter-intuitive?

Hedges offers explanations which expound on Freud’s theories. “We are tempted to reduce life to a simple search for happiness. Happiness, however, withers if there is no meaning.” Essentially, while love tends to give us happiness—the closest to happiness one can usually hope to get—and, usually, meaning, war and destruction can also give us an overpowering sense of meaning, and thus, commutatively, of happiness.

Artists have struggled for centuries to articulate and make sense of life’s two most impenetrable, most bewildering forces. A common thread in Shakespeare—who wrote long before Freud baptised human instinct Eros and Thanatos—is the inter-dependancy and commingling of love and hate. In his tragedies, one can’t exist without the other. Hedges discussed only Richard III, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra—however I think the most archetypal example is found in Romeo and Juliet, the most quintessential conflict between love and hate. Hedges writes, “War fills our spiritual void ... And this is a quality war shares with love, for we are, in love, also able to choose fealty and self-sacrifice over security.” The common thread between Eros and Thanatos, love and hate, creation and destruction, is this: the search for meaning. (If Eros and Thanatos are the effects, the search for mening is the cause, and therefore may supercede both Eros and Thanatos as the primary human instinct.) Both love and war give us the hope of a higher significance to our lives: something beyond our own comprehension, something to justify our own lack of understanding of our selves. In searching for meaning, we search for something that transcends ourselves. The most basic human struggle is a search for the answer to the most haunting question—we want to understand our own mind. This desire is what generated the inventing of God, science, philosophy, religion, the entire concept of meaning, even a definition of consciousness (ex: Freud’s Id, Ego, and Superego). Romeo and Juliet shows two courses of action stemming from the same basic desire; in the search for a cause or a higher meaning, some choose love and others war. In the Bible, Adam and Eve eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in searching for this answer, condemning themselves to expulsion from Eden—the concept which ultimately justifies the phrase “Ignorance is bliss.”

Ignorance is also bliss for the soldiers in Hedges’ memoir. These people grow closer to Thanatos and farther from Eros than most human beings ever will in their lifetimes. And the result is a condamnation parallel to Adam and Eve’s; in exchange for their revelation about Thanatos, they lose life-as-they-formerly-knew-it—even if they survive their battles. “98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties,” Hedges states. He describes that, for these soldiers, “Drugs took the place of battle. Suicide took the place of heroic death.” So maybe there is a more real Reality just outside the range of our perception—and maybe it’s better if we don’t try to see it.

One of the most frightening aspects of Reality is that it is inescapable. Life is a dream from which we can never wake up; there are no digressions; it is impossible to hit the Pause button and walk away. Or start over. The one way to exist (for a short time) outside of Reality—assuming that my thesis, that Reality is nothing more or less than perception, a projection onto a screen which may or may not originate in a film reel somewhere—is to alter one’s state of consciousness through drugs. Which is why so many ex-soldiers become drug addicts. We are trapped inside our own minds, our own experiences, our own concepts—when life gets too ugly, it is impossible to look away. And if it also proves impossible to simply repress the more horrible of the images we’ve seen, there is no recourse.

Because these soldiers—the only people with such a deep understanding of Thanatos’ full potential, the only people not shielded from that horrendous knowledge—almost inevitably self-destruct (through drug-addiction, insanity, and often suicide), we have to wonder if perhaps man is not equipped, physically or psychologically, to tolerate the knowledge of his own capacity for evil, of Thanatos’ full and terrifying range.

Perhaps, we are not meant to know certain things.

A question that has long intrigued us: Is man inherently evil or good? Freud’s answer is that he is both. The reason that we can’t learn from the past and stop fighting wars—why each generation has to conceive its own disillusionment through yet another war—is that we are all born with Thanatos inside of us. It is not acquired or learned, consequently nor can it be rejected or un-learned. It is genetic, inherent, and inescapable. Hedges writes, “As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we have for violence. And we will court our own extermination.” Thus in a convoluted way, the idea of the Original Sin is no myth. “When we view our lives honestly from the inside we are all failures, all sinners, all in need of forgiveness.” However, there’s hope in the existentialist principle Hedges also touches upon when he writes, “though we may not do what we want, we are responsible for our lives. It does not matter what has been made of us; what matters is what we ourselves make of what has been done of us.” Man may not be master of his own mind, but he is far from powerless.

And finally, the existence of Eros—of the small-but-scrappy Hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box—is as ineluctable as Thanatos. Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, is quoted by Hedges as relating, “Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.” Although it may be harder to find love than hate, love gives us a degree of Meaning that hate never will. And while hate destroys, love can only create. It is our one possibility of lasting happiness and meaning.

You try to remember how cold you are right now, for the next time you're suffocating in the heat

2005-10-09T03:01:03Z

Ceux qui me manquent le plus:

La langue. Le son de la langue, la voix basse des femmes, le "p" prononcé dans le mot "psychologie," la difference entre "ou" et "u," le rhythm, le son, le petit vocabulaire éfficace, la franchesse, la façon de s'exprimer nettement et honnêtement, les vieux chanteurs, les jolis accents sur les lettres

Les très petits vieux hommes qui sont nettement "français"

Aller dans des cafés avec des amis après la sortie de l'école

Rencontrer des amis par hasard partout en ville

La pelouse du Thabor, le soleil, les amis, allumer la première cigarette, boire de la bière, s'en foutre de tout, se laisser détendre

Se balader dans un cathédral et régarder tout en haut

La ville complètement vide, en plein nuit ... ou toujours pleine de gens, quand on est bien bourré et tout parrait très, très beau pour le moment—et pour le moment, le moment est bien suffisant

Attendre à l'arrêt de bus tout en savant que la soirée qui va bientôt commençer sera la meilleure de ta vie

Sortir du cinéma ou du theatre à onze heure, et voir qu'il fait toujours jour

Entendre M. Bazin lire Baudelaire

Le Voyage en Provence. Aix-en-provence. La mer. Le vacanciel. Diner avec des amis, boire du vin dégeulasse, se promener sur la plage. Les marchés en plein air, se perdre au milieu des gens, se trouver dans un lieu inconnu

Fumer du cannabus au Thabor, et voir la ville comme c'est la première fois dans ta vie

Normandie; être défoncer grace à de nombreuses euphories

Apprendre à lire pour la deuxième fois

Voir des films, des expositions, des chefs d'ouevres, des pièces; le Centre Pompidou

Voir quelque chose de totalement nouvel, réel, et beau chaque jour, et prendre conscience soudain: Ca, c'est ta vie, et tu en fais partie

ithinkitmatters @ 2005-10-03T21:14:00

2005-10-04T01:41:36Z

Can I even put it into words, how much I love this little piece of metal in my left eyebrow?

No. No I can't.

St. Petersburg

2005-09-29T06:02:19Z

The two essential elements of great American drama are alcohol and the night. Alcohol makes us honest, and the night is when we tell secrets. Mr. K
________

I am one of the last surviving genetic members of a dead monarchy.

Gallia was a baroness, who was born and raised in China. Her father, the second son of a tsar-loyal baron, was the only surviving Fein-Fedorinchik after the Russian Revolution. Days after his dismissal from the army, purely by coincidence he met his fiancee, whom he believed he would never see again, on a train carrying refugees out of the country. So, ex-patriated, loyal to a regime that no longer existed, they raised their daughter in China, where she learned French, Russian, and the art of telling the future with a deck of playing cards.

Gallia was inarguably beautiful, blond hair and blue eyes, and a degree in philosophy by the time she met and fell in love with the American soldier who would be the father of Doug and Will. Gallia raised her children in Greece, while her husband was active in the military until he died along with many other influential military and political figures in what was called an "accident" on a ship off the eastern American coastline.

Her next husband was another American soldier - a colonel - who flew planes that eventually dropped bombs over Europe in WWII. Their daughter, Anna, left school when she was twenty to take care of Gallia, who passed away soon after, having survived ten years with breast cancer. And Anna's my mother. And that's something you didn't know about me.

ithinkitmatters @ 2005-09-27T22:00:00

2005-09-28T02:09:21Z

Amazing how a lack of sleeping and eating affects your quality of life.

Oh, they are real, all right, and it may be the reason they don't seem real to you is that you aren't very real yourself. (Warren)

You're revolutionizing the genre, man.

2005-09-27T02:35:54Z

I noticed this thing in my head this afternoon that has been there a while, only I just recently became aware of it. And now that I know it's there, I can think about it whenever I want to, notice how it feels, watch it, take its vital signs. It's not exactly a thing per se, more like a quality. And I can analyze it, sort of - but at that point I'm already outside of it, looking in. It's vaguely enigmatic; I think I'm starting to get it, the way you sort of get a very inscrutable person whom you hardly know - mostly by intuition, but somehow, you trust it.

I wonder if it's been brought to my attention because of reading Freud's lectures on the unconscious, preconscious, subconscious, etc - like how talking about dreams so much has made me remember my dreams more often lately.

Freud would call it my Ego, I think - the thing that's the driving force of all my conscious thoughts before I think them, the source of everything, the little person behind the screen giving orders and typing frantically, and probably drinking black coffee and smoking Lucky Strikes, if I had to take this stupid anthropomorphism even further. It's sort of like the me that's really me, but that's only acting when I'm not thinking about it - when I'm actually being the narrative and not reading along as I go.

Take the symbol out of all these metaphors and compress the intangible subtexts, and maybe that's a picture of what I'm trying to describe.

Fin, bref, it was a nifty little discovery.

Madeline called when I was in the middle of writing this, and I fucking live for her phonecalls, and I derive nothing but amusement from the fact that she always interrupts something. In fact, there have definitely been at least two - possibly as many as four - distinct instances in my lifetime when my phone has rung while I was in my bed masturbating. And every time, the person calling has been Madeline.

I wonder if our friendship will ever reach that sacred level where I will not feel awkward telling her this.
________

Jose Saramago's Blindness has been the most cathartic experience of any book I've ever read. I have about a third of it left - what I read tonight left me shaking and almost crying. This is Lord of the Flies for grown-ups, kids - serious, serious shit that you have to read - as a human being - you have to read this. Not to mention that his voice, even translated, is one of the best I've ever read; not to mention that he makes the too-horrific-to-even-imagine beautiful. Stunningly.

Monday of an 11-day-long week

2005-09-26T19:35:12Z

Everyone is so young. Freshmen, especially boys, are just little kids - do they notice me smirking at them? I should be a lecherous old man.

People my age are young, too.

Who was it I was talking to this summer when we realized that we are so jaded with college life, we'll have nowhere to go when we finally get there? We'll just have to give up drinking, have surgery to become virgins again, start the whole process over again, I guess. That was the only conclusion we reached.

Lecture XIX - Resistance and Repression

2005-09-26T04:52:19Z

Everyone should just give me a typed list of reasons why they are worth my time, for me to evaluate and reflect on in my spare time, before I make any decisions.

I have that thing that's the spark of a sketch for a beginning of an initiation of a base for a plan of an idea. But I don't even want to write it, because I'll fuck it up. I want Jose Saramago to write it for me; he would do it brilliantly. And Jose, being the Nobel prize-winner that he is, could justify eliminating all the extraneous crap from his schedule in order to just sit down and write - brilliantly. (I have calculus homework, endless stupid obligations like loitering around the dining hall in a plastic apron and rubber gloves, spending a required hour per day on a piece of rank-smelling cardio-vascular exercise equipment, filling out applications for scholarships I don't want; scheduling appointments, making appointments, going to appointments; figuring out where the hell to start, then starting; and I'm starting to get claustrophobic, and I'm only starting.)

When I went for a walk today, by myself, I realized how beautiful this place is, and it made me happy, along with the combination of a few songs I can't go a day without listening to three or four times, that make me smile as I choke up. It makes me sad to think how much easier it is to just not think about certain people - when they're all I want to think about. ("Certain people" is a euphemism for I'm full of crap and completely in denial, by the way. All right, well, I know what I'm talking about, so fuck you.)

You know that question that seems to come up a lot, and that you never really have an answer to so you choose someone totally arbitrarily, thinking "What the hell, that might be cool"? "If you could meet any person in history, who would it be?" I would really like to meet Sigmund Freud. I would really like to walk into his office, shut both doors behind me, shake his hand, introduce myself, sit down, have a cup of coffee - he strikes me as more of a tea person, but oh well - and just talk, and have him tell me that everything in my life is a big, repressed Electra complex.

I would be the perfect subject for psycho-analysis, because I am so onto their fucking game that they would never get what they wanted out of me. That sounds so antagonistic, what I just said; what I really mean, is that I have my story and I'm sticking to it; I thought long ago that I knew more about myself than anyone ever would, and now I legitimately know that I'm right; and even if I'm wrong, well, what's right and wrong anyway; enfin, they would never ever make me crack. And I would laugh at them.

Books I've Read

2005-09-25T16:34:46Z

I've been wanting to do this for a while, make a book of all the books I've read, but I'm also lazy, so I'll type it instead.

* = one of my favorites
** = I want you to read this book
*** = amazing, amazing, life-altering book

June, 2005

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises*

"...You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity."
"Go on," I said. "Who did you get this stuff from?"
"Everybody. Don't you read? Don't you ever see anybody? You know what you are? You're an expatriate. Why don't you live in New York? Then you'd know these things. What do you want me to do? Come over here and tell you every year?"
"Take some more coffee," I said.
"Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave. You know what's the trouble with you? You're an expatriate. One of the worst type. Haven't you heard that? Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers."
He drank the coffee.
"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes."
"It sounds like a swell life," I said. "When do I work?"

At the time this made me miss France, pointedly. I was an expatriate, see? I hung around cafes.

"Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time)

Love:
...the ideal is unattainable and happiness mediocre.

This is the book that makes me want to be a writer. It's also the book that told me, you do not get to know people. You make them a screen to play images over. Except, I don't believe it. Disillusionment is definitely not the end. The thing I won't throw out, is the idea that life is boring without obsessions; the closest you ever get to happiness is to be utterly absorbed in something.

...the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

I can still remember the chills I got when I read the last words of this enormous book that was so hard to read, I had to fight to finish it. Good grief, did it pay off though.

July, 2005

Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room**

"Oh God, oh God, oh God!" exclaimed Jacob, as the four undergraduates left the house. "Oh, my God!"

Essentially the thing to understand is that Jacob dies too young, and in the meantime, too many people are wasting his life. Don't you ever feel like panicking when you're somewhere you don't want to be - and it's precious time you'll never ever see again?

....For the moment after we know nothing about him.
Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.

Every other page of my copy of this book is riddled with question marks, not notes.

Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Franz Kafka, "The Metamorphosis," "The Judgment," "In the Penal Colony," "A Country Doctor," "The Hunger Artist," "The Burrow"

Samuel Beckett, "First Love," "The Expelled," "The Calmative," "The End"*

Mr. K told my playwriting class the other day that some renowned scholar wrote a thesis, something like, while art is generally inspired by life, Sheakespeare's art inspired life and that humanity had never known it was capable of so much complexity as exists in his characters. Beckett does something remarkably similar, pointing out something that's inside everyone but is not talked about, that we sort of ignore, but know exists.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire*

The closest I've ever come to a "religious experience" was to start reading one of the most impenetrable, complex works of postmodernist literature at 6 a.m. after an all-nighter and finish at 3:40 that afternoon, and walk into class ten minutes late.

Prefaced by a quote from James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson:
This reminds me of the ludicrous account he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. "Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats." And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said, "But Hodge shan't be shot: no, no, Hodge shall not be shot."

Not me, not me, everyone else, sure, but not me - shut up. We're all crazy.

[Nick Halpern: "After this class a lot of people will grab a slice of pizza. Across the world, people will be kidnapped and beheaded. It's all random."]

I would just quote the entire book, but it would take too long, and probably be illegal. Moving on.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Read at Peet's Coffee. I miss Peet's Coffee.

August, 2005

Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler*

I took this dialogue as a warning to be on guard: the world is falling apart and tries to lure me into its disintegration.

...for something to take form, develop, or deteriorate according to the phases of human events. Or, rather, to follow the mental models through which we live our human events. Or, rather, to follow the mental models through which we attribute to human events the meanings that allow them to be lived.

Is this enough to say you would like to live several lives simultaneously? Or that you actually do live them? That you separate your life with one person or in one environment from your life with others, elsewhere? That in every experience you take for granted a dissatisfaction that can be redeemed only in the sum of all dissatisfactions?

Is she a prisoner with me? Is she my prisoner? Is she my prison?

Every theory you come up with to justify your life, make it mean something or feel real, is equally valid and equally wrong. So carry on.

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants

Jose Saramago, All the Names

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita**

"Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual relationship."
"Bah!" said the cynical nymphet.

September, 2005

Samuel Beckett, Molloy***

Admittedly, I read it because it's Halpern's favorite novel. Admittedly, his opinion weighs heavily on my opinion, mais quandmeme, this is in my top five.

Plays: Martin McDonough, "The Pillowman" — John Patrick Shanley, "Doubt" — Eugene O'Neill, "Long Day's Journey Into Night" — Marsha Norman, "'night, Mother"

October, 2005

Jose Saramago, Blindness***

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

Plays: Peter Shaffer, "Equus" — Tony Kushner, "Angels in America" — Edward Albee, "The Zoo Story" — August Wilson, "Fences"

James Hillman, A Blue Fire

Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

first entry

2005-09-25T01:39:27Z

The idea is this, that I need to write more than I currently do. Wait, I need an excuse to write more than I currently do. The long-hand, written-by-hand journal deal has served me well, in my best run I managed to keep it going more or less consistently for about a year - to sum it up, July 26 2004 (the first sentence: I was starting to feel depressed - just so underwhelmed.) until August 3 2005 (the last sentence: I wish no one had even told me - I wish I'd happened to be away somewhere and unreachable for the past 24 hours - because probably, everything will be fine - but it's this uncertainty that's agonizing.) 129 pages total. There're even some entries in French, in there. Ah - I'm sure those words will continue to evoke nostalgia and acute embarassment decades from now. But since it kind of fizzled out and died around the time I got to Cambridge and stopped having time to think privately - unless I was reading, or writing something else - let alone document those thoughts, I'm thinking it's time to make the technological leap. I will never stop making fun of myself for having a "blog," by the way.

I have been in Windsor for two weeks. It's hurting. To be fair there is nothing objectively terrible about this place, in fact it's an incredible school where I'm being taught a mind-bendingly enormous amount of information, and I have a couple of teachers who are fucking incredible people. What makes me sad is the constant exposure to people who have every reason to be very interesting, and fail miserably. That, and the restriction of personal liberties like going for a walk after eight p.m. on a school night or getting in a car without written permission, or, hell, drinking. And the fact that everyone who loves me, and I love, is very far away - which would be true regardless of whether I'm in Connecticut or not - but, fuck. What I wouldn't give to be able to do that - you know, that thing they do in Harry Potter - APPARATE, that's it. Yes. I'd like to apparate, which doesn't require money or time or permission or a driver's license. And then no one would ever get rid of me.

You're behaving foolishly, said the doctor angrily, if your idea is to turn this place into a hell, then you're going about it in the right way, but remember we're on our own here, we can expect no outside help.

Whether you're referring to an insane asylum-turned-corral-for-the-blind, or the entire world, this is probably the most beautiful expression of atheism I've ever read, in a convoluted, cynical sort of way; and Jose Saramago is threatening the special place in my heart formerly dominated by Vladimir Nabokov, my hero, the love of my life.