suffering

Oh, in my poor, earthly, Euclidean mind I know only that suffering exists, that no one is to blame, that one thing leads to another just like that, that life goes on and things find their own equilibrium in the end—but then, that is just Euclidean nonsense, I know that, and when it comes down to it I can’t agree to live by it!

Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.

I had a fantasy of myself drinking just then, not drinking in the sophisticated, martini-glass sense but in the raging, obliterating sense, drinking to get drunk, drinking in order to yield to that rebellious urge and show everyone in the room just how angry I was, just how out of place I felt, just how self-destructive I could be in response.

You take away the drink and you take away the single most important method of coping you have. How to talk to people without a drink. How to sit on the sofa and watch TV and not crawl right out of your own skin. How to experience a real emotion—pain or anxiety or sadness—without an escape route, a quick way to anesthetize it. How to sleep at night.

I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me. Job 7:3

Hurting people not only does not change them, it is never called for.

Let her, if she will, forgive him her own suffering, her own extreme anguish as a mother, but she has no right to forgive the suffering of her mutilated child; even if the child himself forgives, she has no right! And if that is so, if the right to forgive does not exist, then where is harmony?

What if sadness is the secret to everything?

Dostoevsky’s heroes ‘feel deeply because they think deeply; they suffer endlessly because they were endlessly deliberative; they dare to will because they have dared to think’.