a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time

“People overcoming their suffering by becoming it, like riding the tiger. Or rather, becoming the wild beast. I may suffer, says the sadist, but I shall not suffer passively, or alone. One way or another there will be others to share it with me. I’ll make sure of that! Above all, sadomasochism is about fusion, and confusion: identification with the victim’s suffering so profound that the victim must be destroyed in order to protect the sadist’s existence. Wonder at the intimacy of the sadistic relationship, a contact across boundaries which can only be called autistic-contiguous, like a vampire sucking blood. […] Identification with the victim puts it too weakly; becoming the victim is more like it. But only for a moment. To stick to the other who now contains one’s doom is hardly a solution. Shared doom is still doom. A violent separation is necessary, sadism a scratch across the autistic-contiguous surface to separate the parties, damaging the other so as to know who really has the power, who really contains the doom, and who’s in charge. The other’s suffering is evidence of that, the position of victimizer the only position in which one’s separateness can be known. Sadism is a blemish on the mirror, distinguishing the image from the reflecting surface. […] In the sadistic act, the sadist seals his dread in the body of the victim, the victim becomes coffin, the victim’s suffering the sadist’s testament to his will to survive his pain. Why sadism is properly called sadomasochism is apparent; identification with the victim is central to the act, without which it would be pointless.”

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for”. We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.