hell is other people

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

— Joan Didion, "Goodbye To All That" (1967), from Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978)

“Before I learned about beauty, I delighted in my body. I was a passionate child with callused feet and lots of words…Finely tuned to the swells of my own and others’ hearts, I sensed a deep well at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the trivia of our everyday lives. Its channel was not always open, and what opened it was not always predictable: often songs and poems, a shaft of late-afternoon light, an unexpected pool of memory, the coo of doves at dusk whose knell ached my own throat and seemed the cry of loneliness itself… Though this seemed obviously the most real and potent form of consciousness, I knew that it was not ‘reality.’ Later, this understanding evolved into a fear of my own susceptibility to madness, but as a child I simply understood that a person could not live with an open channel to the sublime inside them; it was impossible to hold on to the collective story of human life with that live cord writhing through you, showering sparks like a downed wire in a hurricane. Human life was defined by composure and linearity, school bus routes and homework and gender and bedtimes and taxes. Though I could meet its requirements most of the time, I knew my adherence to the logic of reality was tenuous, that a more feral sensibility reigned beneath it.”