Sanity

"Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion.....To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet [the lover] desires exaltation and expansion. a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head in the heavens."


"If souls are seperate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible....Love desires personality. Therefore love desires division."

G.K. Chesterton


"Why does one love the men one loves? Perhaps, as Iris Murdoch says, there's no such thing as a question without an answer; but this is such a bald question as to be both boring and risible. Is it scent? history? mother? father? fate? accident? caprice? fashion? vanity?"

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, An accidental biography


"(..) He has found a way - a way demeaning to his intelligence - to interpret the world. I hate it. He struts on the small stage of his created world and everybody else (...) is a supporting player. Yet underlying all the polished maneuvers, the postures, the ready attribution of blame, is a palpable sense of duty and honor and loyalty - a desire to be better than he is. Sometimes I think he despises me because I know he is better than he is. He is two people, one of them capable of saying, no hint of bravado in his voice, "Sometimes I blame the white man for everything, I'm so full of shit." His self-absorption serves his pride - and defeats it. He lives like a hostage, pleasing his captors, identifying his enemies. "Oh how I wish you could understand me!" he says.
It hurts him to try to make sense out of life."

"His rhetoric deadens his intelligence, of course, but worse, his emotions, too"

"He said I healed him. It is strange; I have had panic attacks for as long as I can remember; I have lived with terror. When he came back I was as happy as I have ever been in my life; I was at home with him. I belonged with his flesh - riding in his car, at dinner, everywhere, he was never alien to me; but the old phobias came back. A measure of the panic that had been chemically ameliorated and that had of recent years abated came back; and I understood that when I am estranged from my rooted sadness and grief - the sadness and grief that reach back into my childhood - I feel terror....Mind over matter, he said; it might have maddened me, but it only made me sad that he said that"

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, An accidental biography