Rough day and I needed this reminder. Rough days tend to make me crawl into my cave and lick my own wounds. I’m good at it, from years of practice, and I find myself to be very consistent and reliable. 😉 I am great at being an island unto myself. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.
Last night I saw the film The End of The Tour about Daved Foster Wallace. Lots of food for thought there, and I’m going to mull it over for a while. As David Foster Wallace did, I too have struggled to reconcile certain aspects of my psyche – namely a sort of frustration at not getting out my thoughts and feelings, a condition David Foster Wallace described as being ‘marooned in our own skulls‘. I call it being stuck in my head. I think it’s what my mother means when she says I think too much. At times I wish I could stop “thinking too much”, but it’s as second nature to me as breathing. It’s who I am.
“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”-David Foster Wallace
This, in part, explains my life-long love affair with books.
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