marginalia

Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language.

“Thirty years ago, when reality in this country changed into a strange dream, when hope disappeared from the world, they went off quietly into an emptiness that could take various forms. They couldn’t live anywhere in the world that was coming into existence, and so they found a no-place and settled there, living nowhere for long years; and when the dream dissolved ten years ago, they were so used to the emptiness they lived in, they had fallen so much in love with their nowhere place, they knew so well its magic charms and had adapted so closely to its flora and fauna, that the world seemed to offer them horribly little. During all those years, while they had been drinking the wonderful nectar of nothingness, they had become choosy, and now no other food tasted good, no structure was equal to the brilliant palace of emptiness. And so they remained there.”

It is through writing that they achieved this depersonalization, through writing that they cut themselves off from the past. Their ideal state is that of pure amnesia.

We discover, often too late to talk to them about it, an episode from their life that a loved one has concealed from you.  Has he really hidden it from you?  He has forgotten, or more likely, over time, he no longer thinks about it.  Or, quite simply, he can't find the words.