Where My Heart Used to Beat

The partition between love and anger is thin. I suppose it's a need to protect the self from further wounding that makes people scream at the one they love.

I liked slicing through the beige brain when it had been fixed; the texture reminded me of cooked cauliflower. It was wonderful to hold this shrunken organ in your hands, the formaldehyde running down over your wrists, and picture the billion firing synapse that for many years had made the cauliflower believe that it was Fred.

There had always seemed to me a frightening amount of chance in the way that people chose their careers.

One thing I had learned from medicine, however, was that denial was often a good strategy; it could buy time for wounds to heal themselves.

the following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a red-brick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In

Albert Einstein wrote, ‘A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.’ Apparently,

I saw an old woman dressed in seatcovers, sewn into a dress, a man in a jacket made from a flag. It gave them an air of desperate grandeur, like guests at an asylum ball.

I wanted another drink; I wanted another bottle; I wanted to drain the river Lethe till I was ready to be born again.

How do you 'clear' your thoughts? You have only other thoughts with which to do the job; 'thoughts', therefore, are both blockage and broom. I suppose what we mean is that we should stop reasoning and try to 'feel' - which presumes that what we 'feel' is more valuable than anything we think ...

At other times I sit and wait. If nothing comes, I’ve discovered that it’s better just to write something – anything. You can always tear up the piece of paper and throw it away. But if you don’t begin, then nothing comes. You have to submit.

A problem is only insoluble to the sufferer; to others, it may have a comic or exasperating simplicity. It occurred to me that at this juncture I had become locked in, like one of my wretched patients for whom the moment for an easy solution has passed. I couldn’t go forward in my life – whatever remained of it – until I had a better understanding of what was past. This was the ‘hard work’ that as a young therapist I had glibly recommended to my patients; but for me it seemed better to turn to the old standbys: denial, sensual pleasure or a change of subject – to Newton, or Matthew Arnold.

A time before Flanders and Auschwitz had shown that, given the means of killing and the opportunity to use them, the species, far from being a pinnacle in creation, was actually lower on the scale than all others in its genus or family.

There lies richness. But if your mind is somehow blocked—if it grips the present moment too hard—then your soul is not porous; the past can’t seep through you, healing and deepening; and you have lived in vain.