“I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to man has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.”
1. “and I never knew survival was like that. If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you knew what you would miss.” (ada limón, from “before”)
2. “The consistency of hurt is what makes it so comforting.” (william nu’utupu giles, from “what do you want? it’s not that simple”)
3. “A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.” (gillian flynn, from “sharp objects”)
4. “When you’ve had a bad experience, you sometimes feel compelled to recreate it in a way that allows you to control it. It’s like you’re attracted to the very thing that bothered you because you’re not done with it- you need to fix that moment so you can move forward. Oscar Wilde said, ‘a burnt child loves fire.’ For me, that means being able to explore things that have been traumatic or you’re not so sure about. The sources of terror in childhood can become the sources of attraction in adulthood.” (todd hido, from “on landscapes, interiors, and the nude”)
5.
(ingmar bergman)
6. “This body knows fear like a front porch knows welcome—it is always coming home.” (brenna twohy, from “swallowtail”)
7. “I liked Hell. I like to go there alone relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone. The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then? I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse would come. The nothing did, and no one.” (marie howe, from “magdalene: the addict)
Antonius Block: I want to confess, as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face, and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to men has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.
Death: Yet you do not want to die.
Antonius Block: Yes I do.
Death: What are you waiting for?
Antonius Block: Knowledge.
Death: You want a guarantee?
Antonius Block: Call it what you will. Is it so hard to conceive of God with one’s senses? Why must He hide in a mist of vague promises and invisible miracles? How are we to believe the believers when we don’t believe ourselves? What will become of us who want to believe, but cannot? And what of those who neither will nor can believe? Why can I not kill God within me? Why does He go on living in a painful, humiliating way? I want to tear Him out of my heart. But He remains a mocking reality which I cannot get rid of. I want knowledge. Not belief. Not surmise. But knowledge. I want God to put out His hand, show His face, speak to me. But He is silent. I cry to Him in the dark, but there seems to be no one there.
Death: Perhaps there is no one there.
Antonius Block: Then life is a senseless terror. No man can live with Death and know that everything is [for] nothing.
Death: Most people think neither of Death nor nothingness.
Antonius Block: Until they stand on the edge of life, and see the Darkness.
Death: Ah, that day.
Antonius Block: I see. We must make an idol of our fear, and call it God.
“You are inaccessible. They said you were healthy, but your sickness is of the worst kind: it makes you seem healthy. You act it so well everyone believes it, everyone except me, because I know how rotten you are inside.”
