So much for the gods not wanting me to suffer. They all tease. I might as well have been a stray dog, pelted with stones or with its tail set alight for their amusement. Not the fat and bones of animals, but our suffering, is what they love to savour.
But it wasn’t more honestly that would have saved me, I thought; it was more dishonesty. In my experience, honesty and expressing your feelings could lead to only one thing. Disaster.
Not giving a hoot would be a luxury. It describes the fine, irreverent carelessness I myself would like to cultivate, in these and other matters.
I saw you as another god.
It’s theatre, Felix protests now, in his head. The art of true illusions! Of course it deals in traumatic situations! It conjures up demons in order to exorcise them! Haven’t you read the Greeks? Does the word catharsis mean anything to you?
The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.
Mr. Duke, Mr. Duke. You are being far too abstract. These are real people. They are not ciphers in your aesthetic of drama, they are not your experimental mice, they are not your playthings. Have some respect.
We use butter, I said. When we can get it. Or margarine. A lot of the time it’s margarine. Butter, he said, musing. That’s very clever. Butter. He laughed. I could have slapped him.
Better to abdicate. Give up his plans for retribution, for restoration. Kiss his former self goodbye. Go quietly into the dark. What has he ever accomplished in his life, anyway, beyond a few gaudy hours, a few short-lived triumphs of no importance in the world where most people live? Why did he ever feel he was entitled to special consideration from the universe at large?
Unrequited love was, at that period of my life, the only kind I seemed to be capable of feeling. This caused me much pain, but in retrospect I see it had advantages. It provided all the emotional jolts of the other kind without any of the risks, it did not interfere with my life, which, although meagre, was mine and predictable, and it involved no decisions.
All of these men are thinking mostly about ruling and rulers. Who should rule, and how. Who should have power, how they should get it, and how they should use it.
Maybe she herself is a kind of fatal woman, like Marilyn Monroe in Niagara, with invisible spider webs coming out of her, entangling men because they can’t help it, and the spider can’t help it either because it’s her nature. Maybe she’s doomed to be sticky.
The whole play takes place on an island,” says Felix, standing beside his whiteboard. “But what kind of island is it? Is it magic in itself? We never really know. It’s different for each one of the people who’s landed on it. Some of them fear it, some of them want to control it. Some of them just want to get away from it.
But I know this isn’t true. It is just passing the buck, as children do, to mothers. I’ve mourned for her already. But I will do it again, and again.
We would have children. Although we knew it wasn’t too likely we could ever afford it, it was something to talk about, a game for Sundays. Such freedom now seems almost weightless.
What well-to-do and once-young, once-beautiful woman or man, cranked up on hormonal supplements and shot full of vitamins but hampered by the unforgiving mirror, wouldn’t sell their house, their gated retirement villa, their kids, and their soul to get a second kick at the sexual can?
How did she end up in this madhouse? By putting one foot in front of the other and never taking her eyes off her feet. You could end up anywhere that way.
Words,” he said, looking in my direction finally but with his eyes strangely unfocussed, as though he was really looking at a point several inches beneath my skin, “are beginning to lose their meanings.
I hope she won’t destroy him, thought Felix. But he’s a con man, don’t forget. A con man playing an actor. A double unreality.
The truth may well turn out to be stranger than we think,” says Simon. “It may be that much of what we are accustomed to describe as evil, and evil freely chosen, is instead an illness due to some lesion of the nervous system, and that the Devil himself is simply a malformation of the cerebrum.