----

"You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less."

I once read in a book by a German writer that people who choose not to eat breakfast are trying to avoid contact with the day so as not to enter fully into it because it is only through that second awakening, that of the stomach, that you can entirely leave behind you the darkness and the nocturnal realm, and it is only once you have arrived safe and sound on the other shore that you can allow yourself to recount what you dreamed without bringing down calamities upon yourself, since, if you do so before you have broken your fast, you are still under the sway of the dream and you betray it with your words, thus exposing yourself to its vengeance. And you tell it as if you were still asleep.

Charlie Brown, undaunted, seeks tenderness and fulfillment on every side: in baseball, in building kites, in his relationship with his dog, Snoopy, in playing with the girls. He always fails. His solitude becomes an abyss, his inferiority complex is pervasive—tinged by the constant suspicion (which the reader also comes to share) that Charlie Brown is not inferior. Worse: he is absolutely normal. He is like everybody else. This is why he is always on the brink of suicide or at least of nervous breakdown: because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives...