Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.

— The Pale King

For at least 10 years before his death, Wallace was working on a long novel that he called The Pale King. Set in a branch of the US Internal Revenue Service, it aimed to articulate the hard-won thesis of mindfulness that Wallace had come to after years of depression and treatment: “Bliss—a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom.”

[...]

Michael Pietsch, who is piecing together the many drafts of The Pale King in collaboration with Nadell and Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, agrees. “The thrust of it,” he says, “is an attempt to look at the dark matter of tedium and boredom and repetition and familiarity that life is made of, and through that to find a path to joy and art and everything that matters. Wallace has set himself the task of making a moving and joyful book out of the matter of life that most writers veer away from as hard as they can. And what he left of it is heartbreakingly full and beautiful and deep. He was looking at how one survives.”

via.

I can’t help but feel as though, in David Foster Wallace, we have lost someone who could not have been more important to the time in which we are living now.

I think that when we look for love courageously, it reveals itself, and we wind up attracting even more love. If one person really wants us, everyone does. But if we’re alone, we become even more alone. Life is strange.

Paulo Coelho (via)

I think I want to nod off for a bit. And by “nod off” I mean “strangle myself while I masturbate.”

Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life. You give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like ‘Maybe we should just be friends’ or ‘How very perceptive’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love.

— Neil Gaiman

I think that all thoughtful people go crazy. I would be worried about you if you were lucid all the time, you know? I would be so worried about you.

— Dr. Carolyn Weber
May 5, 2009

Good professors make all the difference.

No human being can be there for you the way a record can. I mean, your friends are your friends, and that’s great, that’s amazing if you’re having a hard time—and I clearly know about this at this point in my life—but nothing can compare with putting on a record and grieving silently or, conversely, celebrating personally. 

If I felt it, there must be someone out there who felt it, too. If I write it down, there must be someone out there who will read it. And if I play it, there must be someone out there who will listen. And maybe—just maybe—I can save them the way music saves me.

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more that you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

This is undoubtedly true, and what one of my newest friends tried explaining to me in plain terms when we spoke the other day. Legitimately, he mostly wanted to talk to me because he was worried. And I can’t say with any sort of accuracy whether or not he’s right to worry about a semi-stranger’s well-being. But I will say that for someone like me who has very little in the way of a plan or some kind of foresight, what’s in front of your face works; and what’s in front of mine admittedly may or may not be cause for worry.

The quote comes from Thomas Merton, and I found it at a great blog, but it’s a little NSFW, if you can deal with that kind of thing.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

Today, I reread this for the hell of it. I am operating on my default setting, and I don’t know how to turn it off.

“Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.”

— Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (via)