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The dreadful gulf between thought and words, will and expression, reality and unreality, and the things that flourish in that gulf, are what this story is about.
Mimicking normality is the hardest thing of all. It has a lack of concern that is impossible to imitate. Exaggerations show up and look like stupidity. But attempts to hide feelings do have the advantage that the observer does not know for sure. Taken to extremes, life is a process of reorientation after shame or glory, and when anxiety sweeps in there is a relief at not having left any definite tracks.
The brain knows no tenses. If it has longed for something, it has already had it. The leap comes when we do not want to lose the future we have already known.
Passion was raging inside her. Its internal combustion engines were firing on all cylinders. She was living on air. She did not eat but needed no nourishment. She did not drink but felt no thirst.
Feigning indifference is as hard as acting normally, and fundamentally the same thing.
“Is there any point in this any longer? In us?” But behind his words, Ester discerned above all a wish for reassurance and relief. He was saying it to find out that he was wrong. There is a resistance in the party who wants to leave, a fear of the unknown, of the hassle and of changing one’s mind. A party not wanting to be left must exploit that resistance. But then they must restrain their need for clarity and honesty. The matter must remain unformulated. A party not wanting to be left must leave it to the one wanting to go to express the change. That is the only way to keep a person who does
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She would rather endure torment than tedium, would rather be alone than in a group of people making small talk. Not because she disliked the small-talkers, but because they absorbed too much energy. Small talk drained her.
If you were close, you did not want to lie. Lying demands a certain amount of dehumanization, at least at that moment. Lying is a carapace. Not to lie when the temptation exists is to render oneself naked.
I want adult love alone. Love that’s equal and linear, not vertical.”
Love needs no words. For a short period you can put your trust in wordless emotion. But in the long run there is no love without words, and no love with words alone. Love is a hungry beast. It lives off touch, repeated assurances and an eye that looks deeply into another eye.
The physicists’ problem: That we don’t remember things that have not yet happened. The philosophers’ problem: That we remember something merely because it has happened. The psychologists’ problem: That we remember what suits us. The politicians’ problem: That people have a memory. The medics’ problem: That memory fails us. The unhappy lovers’ problem: That the memory of what has happened alters us.
Strength and competence arouse admiration, but not love. It’s the shortcomings in a person that inspire love. But those shortcomings are not enough. They have to be complemented by autonomy and self-distance. Flaws create affection, but sooner or later aggressions will be generated by the very thing that arouses affection. Pure deficiency is in its helplessness as impossible to love as steely strength.
Words were not enduring monuments to intentions and truths. They were sounds to fill silences with.
Happiness seldom exists in the experiencing of happiness. It resides in the expectation of happiness and almost only there.
The only weapon of someone who loves is to stop loving. However messy and demanding their love may have seemed to its object, it goes against the grain to be deprived of it, even though the object may never have wanted it in the first place. It is the balance of power that is shifted by the new indifference, and the fear of appearing foolish and ordinary in the eyes of the one who formerly did the loving.
When the parasite Hope is taken from its carrier the Host, the carrier either dies or is set free.
