leigh

Some lives are hit with catastrophic trauma over and over again; then trauma, with its concomitant strategies of survival, becomes a chronic condition. Defenses and denial become second nature; traumatic repetition becomes second nature. Trauma as a mode of being violently halts the flow of time, fractures the self, and punctures memory and language. And then there are those afflicted by what Freud called “Schicksalsneurose,” that is, a “fate neurosis,” who seem to be living under a bad spell, haunted by a curse that often precedes their lives, an ancestral curse perhaps, hidden and intangible, relegated to secrecy and silence.

"Flesh is willing, but the Soul requires

The great sufferers are never bored: disease fills them, the way remorse feeds the great criminals. For any intense suffering produces a simulacrum of plenitude and proposes a terrible reality to consciousness, which it cannot elude; while suffering without substance in that temporal mourning of ennui affords consciousness nothing that forces it to fruitful action. How to cure an unlocalized and supremely impalpable disease which infects the body without leaving any trace upon it, which insinuates itself into the soul without marking it by any sign? Ennui is like a sickness we have survived, but one which has absorbed our possibilities, our reserves of attention and has left us impotent to fill the void which follows upon the disappearance of our pangs and the fading of our torments. Hell is a haven next to this displacement in time, this empty and prostrate languor in which nothing stops us but the spectacle of the universe decaying before our eyes.