Surely the Greeks had a word for it, choosing to act in one’s own very worst interests? Yes, they did. It was akrasia.
I was pure and good. I loved it that they couldn’t understand how profound I was.
She was touched by his delicacy, by the way he stared fiercely at his sheet of paper, perhaps trying to hear in advance his poem through her ears.
This sense of absence had been growing... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity... He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist.
The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.
But Cecilia, having learned modern forms of snobbery at Cambridge, considered a man with a degree in chemistry incomplete as a human being.
He doesn’t trouble himself with closing the shutter – total darkness, sense deprivation, might activate his thoughts. Better to stare at something and hope to feel his eyelids grow heavy. Already, his tiredness seems fragile or unreliable, like a pain that comes and goes. He needs to nurture it, and to avoid thoughts at all costs.
His right hemisphere had died. He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of dissociation he could begin to contemplate his own end as a commonplace – a flurry of burying or cremating, a welt of grief raised, then subsiding as life swept on. Perhaps he had already died.
How could he fail to love someone so strangely and warmly particular, so painfully honest and self-aware, whose every thought and emotion appeared naked to view, streaming like charged particles through her changing expressions and gestures?
The new, wellspring of all bad dreams. Driven by a self-harming compulsion, I listen closely to analysis and dissent.
Any five-year-old girl – though boys would do – gave substance to her continued.
These disasters are the work of our twin natures. Clever and infantile. We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage.
It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.
Why would the world configure itself so harshly?
The world is also full of wonders, which is why I’m foolishly in love with it.
We’re bound by the same rules that dog out pets. The great chain of non-being is round our necks too.
And he saw the studio he was about to abandon for his bed as it might have appeared in a documentary film about himself that would reveal to a curious world how a masterpiece was born.
My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth.
It wasn’t hatred that killed the innocents but faith, that famished ghost, still revered, even in the mildest quarters.
It was not always the case that a large minority comprising the weakest members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of work and of many constraints on their behaviour and were able to devote much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not a natural occurrence. There was a time when children were treated like small adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource.