It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the complex relationship between fear and intrigue, particularly regarding madness.
In this quote, Edna O'Brien describes a powerful encounter with madness, suggesting that it can evoke both fear and fascination. This duality indicates how humans often react to concepts that challenge their understanding of sanity, showing that fear can coexist with a deep curiosity that compels us to explore the unknown aspects of the human psyche.
In practice
During a speech on mental health, I referenced Edna O'Brien's reflection on madness to highlight both the fear and fascination that many have with mental illness.
Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.
That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.
Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.
Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.
Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.
I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.
Mad; adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.
For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite other than himself—and then trying to grasp it. But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts—based on the realization that the only real "I" is the whole endless process.
The essence of the religious emotions consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.
Indignation must always be the answer to indignity. Reality is not destiny.
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