serialized | &litquotes;

the banality of evil

There exists, for everyone, a sentence — a series of words — that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you're lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.
VALIS. Philip K. Dick.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Ursula K. Le Guin.

The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one — in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that — as if that weren't enough — but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.
VALIS. Philip K. Dick.

The mask? Because we were never ugly
enough. Because our ugliness was epic.
Because we were given to it, because
we were so misgiven. You wear one. I
wear one. Yes. Kings, Pharaohs had them
fabricated, poured out in gold and beaten.
Most wore them to the grave. In Mexico
the living wear them, not to scare the dead
away, but as invitation. They leave candy
on the mounds of those they mourn. New
Orleans? Women wear them in order
to bare everything else. Men wear them
in order to watch. I can remember, back
before it all grows grim, making one
out of the news, trying to paste it together.
I remember my mother helping me. I don’t
really remember my father. Something
like a face, like the man in the moon.
I understand we’re hardwired this way,
to make faces before anything else.
It’s why we see the Madonna in mold,
alien architecture in Martian crater creep.
We keep looking for those first faces, first
familia. Every culture, every eon. Witness
the oldest we know, his cave, his wall, one
hundred seventy centuries gone. They call
him Sorcerer. They call me Knight.
We have always lived in the dark.
Gotham Wanes. Bryan D. Dietrich.

You die and go to hell, where the devil offers a game of chance. If you play today, you have a 1/2 chance of winning; if you play tomorrow, the chance will be 2/3; and so on. If you win, you can go to heaven, but if you lose you must stay in hell forever. When should you play?
Logic: A Very Short Introduction. Graham Priest.

Patrick,

the issue is pain. understand this. […]

I'm not sure why I'm writing you, patrick. who I am as I write this isn't who I am during My day job, nor who I am when I kill. I wear a lot of faces, and some you'll never see, and some you'd never want to. I've seen a few of your faces — a pretty one, a violent one, a reflective one, some others — and I wonder which you'll wear if we ever meet with carrion between us. I do wonder.

all guiltless, I've heard, will meet reproach. maybe so. and so be it. I'm not sure the worthy victims are worth all the trouble actually.

I dreamed once that I was stranded on a planet of the whitest sand, and the sky was white. that's all there was — me, spilling drifts of white sand as wide as oceans, and a burning white sky. I was alone. and small. after days of wandering, I could smell My own rot, and I knew I'd die in these drifts of white under a hot sky, and I prayed for shade, and eventually it came. and it had a voice and a name. "Come," Darkness said, "come with me." but I was weak, I was rotting, I couldn't rise to My knees. "Darkness," I said, "take My hand. Take Me away from this place." and Darkness did.

so you see what I'm teaching you, patrick?
Darkness, Take My Hand. Dennis Lehane.