The cocktail party
Published:
“There is certainly no purpose in remaining in the dark except long enough to clear from the mind the illusion of having ever been in the light. The fact that you can’t give a reason for wanting her is the best reason for believing that you want her.”
- Stay long enough in the dark to allow your eyes to adjust. The inability to reason about a motivation can be the best reason to pursue it.
- “It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are. That’s the best advice that I can give you.”
- “You will find that you survive humiliation. And that’s an experience of incalculable value.”
“There was a door and I could not open it. I could not touch the handle. What is hell? Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
- Projections rather than imaginations.
- “Illness offers him a double advantage: to escape from himself—and get the better of his wife.”
- “All cases are unique, and very similar to others.” - Says the doctor. Touché
- Reilly: “…You would produce amazing dreams, to oblige me. I could make you dream any kind of dream I suggested, and it would only go to flatter your vanity with the temporary stimulus of feeling interesting.” Edward: “But I am obsessed by the thought of my own insignificance.” Reilly: “Precisely. And I could make you feel important, and you would imagine it a marvellous cure; and you would go on, doing such amount of mischief as lay within your power—until you came to grief. Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
- “You have both of you pretenders to be consulting me; both, tried to impose upon me your own diagnosis, and prescribe your own cure. But when you put yourselves into hands like mine you surrender a great deal more than you meant to. This is the consequence of trying to lie to me.”
- “The shadow of desires of desires. A prey to the devils who arrive at their plenitude of power when they have you to themselves.”
“Disillusion can become itself an illusion if we rest in it.”
- The doubt that doubts everything is not a doubt.
- “It’s not the feeling of anything I’ve ever done, which I might get away from, or of anything in me I could get rid of—but of emptiness, of failure towards someone, or something, outside of myself; and I feel I must . . . atone—is that the word?”