I never thought this labyrinth would be a pleasant thing to return to.

Endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart, always branching off into other pieces I’d come cross later — on old napkins, the tattered edges of an envelope, once even on the back of a postage stamp; everything is anything but empty; each fragment completely covered with the creep of years and years of ink pronouncements; layered, crossed out, amended; handwritten, typed; legible, illegible; impenetrable, lucid; torn, strained, scotch taped; some bits crisp and clean, others faded, burnt or folded and refolded so many times the creases have obliterated whole passages of god knows what — sense? truth? deceit? a legacy of prophecy or lunacy or nothing of the kind?, and in the end achieving, designating, describing, recreating — find your own words; I have no more; or plenty more but why? And all to tell — what?

On Reading, Writing, and Depression:

The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone. Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in the pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.

Writers and readers have always been prone to this estrangement. Communion with the virtual community of print requires solitude, after all. But the estrangement becomes much more profound, urgent, and dangerous when that virtual community is no longer densely populated and heavily trafficked; when the saving continuity of literature itself is under electronic and academic assault; when your alienation become generic rather than individual, and the business pages seem to report on the world’s conspiracy to grandfather not only you but all your kind, and the price of silence seems no longer to be obscurity but outright oblivion.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

Think of the novel as a lover: Let’s stay home tonight and have a great time, just because you’re touched where you want to be touched, it doesn’t mean you’re cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it.

How to be Alone - Jonathan Franzen [you are the shit]  

Every tounge bit had another word to say.

It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint—it’s a physical thing, like it’s physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don’t come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people’s words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crush-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.

The brain is the only organ that tries to make sense of its pain. It is as if the bone were trying to understand the break, as if the blood vessel could comprehend its rupture. But this is also its greatest impediment to understanding. The mind clings fiercely to any alternative to chaos, even if that alternative is self-destruction.

Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor. People are screwed up in this world. I'd rather be with someone screwed up and open about it than somebody perfect and ready to explode.

…and how is it even possible to be both attracted and not attracted to someone at the very same moment, and whether maybe I am a robot incapable of real feelings, and do you think that actually, like, trying to follow rules about shutting up and not caring has made me into some kind of hideous monster whom no one will ever love or marry

__________

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.

__________

You never felt jealousy, did you?  Of course not: I need not ask you; because you never felt love.  You have both sentiments yet to experience: your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it.  You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away.  Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you neither see the rocks bristling not far off in the bed of the flood, nor hear the breakers boil at their base.  But I tell you—and you may mark my words—you will come some day to a craggy pass in the channel, where the whole of life’s stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer current—as I am now.

__________

When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. . . Thomas Edison’s last words were: “It’s very beautiful over there.” I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.

__________

Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day, and she would listen to every sound, spring to her feet, feel surprised that it did not come; then, at sunset, always more sorrowful, she would wish the next day were already there.

She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed to derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immediate gratification of her heart,—being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes.

She would rush up to it, she would crouch down next to it, she would delicately stir its embers, so close to dying out, she would look all around for something that could relive it; and the most distant memories, as well as the most recent events, what she was feeling and what she was imagining, her sensuous desires, which were dissipating, her plans for happiness, which were cracking in the wind like dead branches, her sterile virtue, her disappointed hopes, the litter of her domestic life — she gathered all of it up, took it, and used it to rekindle her sadness.

And yet the flames died down, either because the supply of fuel was exhausted, or because too much was piled on. Little by little, love was extinguished by absence, longing smothered by routine; and the incendiary glow that had reddened her pale sky was covered over in shadow and by degrees faded away. In the torpor of her consciousness, she even misunderstood her feelings of repugnance for her husband to be yearnings for her lover, the scorching of hatred for the rekindling of affection; but since the storm continued to rage and her passion burned itself to ashes, and since no help came and no sun appeared, night closed in completely around her, and she remained lost in a terrible, piercing cold.

She was suffering only because of her love, and she felt her soul slipping away through the memory of it, just as the wounded, in their last agony, feel the life going out of them through their bleeding wounds.

We tried shyly and plaintively, through the whispering of wilting gardens, to keep intact for as long as possible. 

   

Epigynous

I like sitting on the grass with a book open on my lap. I like how a pair of hands can fit together with another so exquisitely. I like how fragile and delicate a face is when fast asleep. I like the gleam that shows up in people's eyes when they smile. I like the refreshing feeling that lurks in one's body after one cries. I like watching the complexion of nature. I like the flow of a piano. I like feeling the air drift in and out of my lungs and how music makes me melt. I like being by myself. I like the scent of rain and how the stars shine at night. I like the way I get lost in life. I like thinking. I like sleep. I like tea. I like the simple things that keep me going.

There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.

I am thawing.