#same night on repeat

[ID: But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. end ID]

[ID: Haunting is often treated as more or less identical to trauma. But trauma and the time of trauma are, in my view, quite different. In the classic psychoanalytic conception, trauma not only misaligns our perception of time, it is, one could say, itself a misalignment of the temporality of experience since trauma is characteristically experienced belatedly. That's to say, it's the repression of the shocking or horrible experience and its displaced repetition that characterizes trauma and that jams time so that one experiences the shock later. As Freud and others have shown, a traumatized person or society is stuck in a past that repeats as a present that can never end. Trauma thus binds you to what can‟t be forgotten or forgiven. It binds you not to the repetition of a memory of a terrible, horrible, shocking event or experience but binds you to the repression of it. This repetition of and libidinal investment in the repression binds the future—what comes next—to the trauma, which is what never ends, what can‟t end. In this sense, trauma is a deeply regressive and repressive state—an awful predicament for both individuals and societies—a fatalistic and aberrant condition because seemingly interminable. end ID]

[ID: a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle. end ID]