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‘I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I’m not one of the self-hating ones.
‘I didn’t want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don’t hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn’t want to play anymore is all.’
I wanted to stop feeling this way.
I’d rather feel nothing than this.’
‘This feeling of wanting to stop feeling by dying, then, is—’ The way she suddenly shook her head was vehement, exasperated. ‘The feeling is why I want to. The feeling is the reason I want to die. I’m here because I want to die.
‘When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.’
It’s like horror more than sadness. It’s more like horror. It’s like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine—no, worse than you can imagine because there’s the feeling that there’s something you have to do right away to stop it but you don’t know what it is you have to do, and then it’s happening, too, the whole horrible time, it’s about to happen and also it’s happening, all at the same time.’
And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh-sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth.
a kind of bland compassion, the expression of someone who was compassionate but was not, of course, feeling what she was feeling, and who honored her subjective feelings by not even trying to pretend that he was. Sharing them.
Because I can’t stand feeling like this another second, and the seconds keep coming on and on.’
All I’d need is I think a month at the outside. Like a controlled coma. You could do that, if you guys want to help.’
if you say you’re in trouble with Hope—people’ll just laugh. Because there’s much worse drugs out there. Believe me I know.’ ‘I’m not laughing at you, Katherine,’ the doctor said, and meant it. ‘But I love it so much.
I’m like so obsessed with Do They Know, Can They Tell,
I don’t want anything except for the feeling to go away. But it doesn’t. Part of the feeling is being like willing to do anything to make it go away. Understand that. Anything. Do you understand? It’s not wanting to hurt myself it’s wanting to not hurt.’
He had extremely good penmanship for a doctor.
He was adding his own post-assessment question, Then what?, when Kate Gompert began weeping for real.
his wife arrived back home and uncovered her hair and came in and saw the Near Eastern medical attaché and his face and tray and eyes and the soiled condition of his special recliner, and rushed to his side crying his name aloud, touching his head, trying to get a response, failing to get any response to her, he still staring straight ahead; and eventually and naturally she—noting that the expression on his rictus of a face nevertheless appeared very positive, ecstatic,...
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a philosopher instead of a king.
One of the positives to being visibly damaged is that people can sometimes forget you’re there, even when they’re interfacing with you. You almost get to eavesdrop. It’s almost like they’re like: If nobody’s really in there, there’s nothing to be shy about. That’s why bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners, deep beliefs revealed, diary-type private reveries indulged out loud; and, listening, the beaming and bradykinetic boy gets to forge an interpersonal connection he knows only he can truly feel, here.
Schtitt has the sort of creepy wiriness of old men who still exercise vigorously.
He has surprised blue eyes and a vivid white crewcut of the sort that looks virile and good on men who h...
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‘Where is their straight shortest then, yes? Where is the efficiently quickly straight of Euclid then, yes? And how many two places are there without there is something in the way between them, if you go?’
WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN.’
TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT SED TE EDERE NON POSSUNT NEFAS EST
THE MAN WHO KNOWS HIS LIMITATIONS HAS NONE.
Schtitt approached competitive tennis more like a pure mathematician than a technician.
that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern.
mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.
the modern O.N.A.N.ite U.S. of A.
the needs, the desires, the fears, the multiform cravings of the individual appetitive will—to the larger imperatives of a team (OK, the State) and a set of delimiting rules (OK, the Law).
the well-disciplined boy begins assembling the more abstract, gratification-delaying skills necessary for being a ‘team player’ in a larger arena: the even more subtly diffracted moral chaos of full-service citizenship in a State.
‘The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?’
‘Without there is something bigger. Nothing to contain and give the meaning. Lonely. Verstiegenheit.’ 36 ‘Bless you.’ ‘Any something. The what: this is more unimportant than that there is something.’
he (Schtitt) had once fallen in love with a tree,
He was trying to think how to articulate some reasonable form of a question like: But then how does this surrender-the-personal-individual-wants-to-the-larger-State-or-beloved-tree-or-something stuff work in a deliberately individual sport like competitive junior tennis, where it’s just you v. one other guy?
The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion.
You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution.
All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.
junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.
Schtitt then falls into the sort of silence of someone who’s enjoying mentally rewinding and replaying what he just came up with.
Mario thinks hard again. He’s trying to think of how to articulate something like: But then is battling and vanquishing the self the same as destroying yours...
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he has this involuntary thing where he laughs whenever anyone else does,
a sticker that thanks him in advance for not smoking.
asked if he was sick or something. Tiny Ewell had said, ‘So it would seem.’
all were watching the recursive loop the medical attaché had rigged on the TP’s viewer the night before, sitting and standing there very still and attentive, looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though the room smelled very bad indeed.
Marathe,
‘My time is finite.’
‘Your offices wish to ask was the Entertainment’s cartridge disseminated through our mechanisms?’
‘Upwards of twenty, Rémy. Out of commission altogether. The attaché and his wife, the wife a Saudi citizen. Four more raggers, all with embassy cards. Couple neighbors or something. The rest mostly police before word got to a level they could stop police from going in before they killed the power.’
We have, as one will say, larger seafood to cook.’
