MIKHAEL

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.

I grow, I fall, I need, I want, I follow, I break, I sink, I love, I exist.

Melancholia ends up in asymbolia, in loss of meaning: if I am no longer capable of translating or metaphorizing, I become silent and I die.

but this is another love—it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop—it rots me away.

You cannot speak to anyone, because the world is empty of the living and filled with the dead,

“I am alive. Like a wound, flower in the flesh, the path of sorrowful blood is opened within me.”

…and I sat there and read which was very nice.

Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly, kneeling and didn’t notice at all: so complete was their listening.