Tag: pain

Sophie Calle, from Exquisite Pain

Sophie: 88 days ago, the man I love left me.
The scene wasplayed out on January 25, 1985, at two in the morning. I was in room 261 of the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi, he was in Paris. The split was done and dusted in three minutes, over the phone. An ordinary story. He had met another woman – a more docile one, I suppose. He would not be coming.

Unknown: I was twelve. It was in 1965. In May. At Arcachon. My mother and I were resting under a chestnut tree. It was midday. My father had left the house in the morning and we were waiting for him. Suddenly, he came out of the garage at the end of the garden, looking dazed and wild-eyed. He told us he had locked the door and tried to asphyxiate himself with exhaust. And he added, “Then I saw you, like the Virgin and Child, in a halo. And I decided not to kill myself.” There and then I jumped on my moped – I remember it was two-colored, orange and gray – and rode. Mad with pain that my dad was such a loser. Disgusted with the image that he gave of his suffering. I rode, straight ahead, for more than fifty kilometers. And then I came back.

[The void is] the anguished experience of lack of balance. We have been unjustly treated, insulted, humiliated: we want to get our own back, to get even, if need be to hurt innocent people as we have been hurt.

Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 502.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory. Saint Anthony in the desert, asked how he could differentiate between angels who came to him humble and devils who came in rich disguise, said you could tell by how you felt after they had departed. When an angel left you, you felt strengthened by his presence; when a devil left, you felt horror. Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.

Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon