Stark raving sane.
The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction. And time is its only measure.
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.
We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.
As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don’t know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.
HANNAH: Don’t let Bernard get to you. It’s only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It’s not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard’s indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.
Can’t you function unless you’re losing?
People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.