a dichotomy of

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

“.. without tenderness, we are in hell.”

“You think the remedy for pain is always more pain. This too, I think, is a symptom”

“Is it possible we have finally paid bitterly enough? That sacrifice is not to be required, that anxiety and terror have been judged sufficient?”

“Don’t you see how you’ve burnt almost all of it, all the tenderness, away”

“I am used to being lonely but forever to be a stranger is a strange grief.”

In the pit of it, you fantasize about dying, tripping on a sidewalk and stumbling into the path of an oncoming car. A gas leak silently offing you in your sleep, a machete weilding madman on public transit, falling down the stairs but drunk so you flop, limb over limb, like a marionette and feel no pain. Anything to make it stop. You have forgotten that leaving is an option.

“But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain’t going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can’t ever suffer again: and that’s worse.”

“I am not delicate. Look at me. I am not trying to disappear.”

““i was alone (…), practicing some familiar grief, my old heart’s sacrament.”

“I was cold and tired and my neck ached. I wanted to sleep and sleep and never wake up. I had lost the few things I knew, and what was here belonged to somebody else. Perhaps that would have been alright if what was inside me was my own, but there was no place to anchor.”