departures (3)

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort which I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me.

Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.

But Jeanne, fear of madness, only the fear of madness will drive us out of the precincts of our solitude, out of the sacredness of our solitude. The fear of madness will burn down the walls of our secret house and send us out into the world seeking warm contact. Worlds self−made and self−nourished are so full of ghosts and monsters.

--Anais Nin, House of Incest.

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Narcissism -- its seductions and pitfalls.

To be unable to love or take any genuine interest in anyone that is not a mirror image of oneself. The utter denial of otherness, difference, patience, tolerance, generosity, distance from oneself.

The first intimation of madness. 

And here too departure offers a forked path: whether you take yourself with you on the journey and remain the same, your self-hatred and self-destructive willfulness accompanying you like the shadow of death (a pointless journey nowhere); or you get rid of yourself to find yourself.

Rimbaud: Car je est un autre...

This is to say that you give up finding 'home' to observe home from a distance.

No purge, no escapism. Just going away to think, to feel alive.

Shatter the mirror, break the rotten 和 (wa)!

And only then may something astonishing happen, who knows.