Mind the Inside

"Je ne suis pas heureuse ici," she seemed to be saying. And, poor little beast, she wasn't. But, like her big sisters and brothers of the human world, she had to bear her unhappiness in solitude, uncomprehending, unconsoled. For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement. This mournful truth was overwhelmingly borne in on me as I watched the abandoned and lovesick cat.
— Aldous Huxley, "Sermons in Cats," Collected Essays, p. 81.

     The reading of yet another book about modern psychological theories is always, I find, a rather exasperating experience. Clothed in an ugly and hardly comprehensible jargon, the obvious is portentiously enunciated, as though it were some kind of esoteric mystery. The immemorially ancient is presented, with fanfare, as a brand-new, epoch-making discovery. Instead of open-mindedness, we find dogmatism; instead of comprehensive views, we are given theories which ignore whole provinces of given reality, whole categories of the most significant kinds of facts. And instead of the concreteness so essential in a science of observation, instead of the principle of multiple causation which must govern all thinking about so complex a creature as man, we are treated to shameless displays of those gravest of intellectual sins, overabstraction, overgeneralization and oversimplification.
— Aldous Huxley, "The Oldest Science," in Ibid., p. 319.

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistence be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 17.

     I walked into my own book, seeking peace.
     It was night, and I made a carelesss movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness. It was this seeing too much, this seeing of a tragedy in the quiver of an eyelid, constructing a crime in the next room, the men and women who had loved before me on the same hotel bed.
     I carry white sponges of knowledge on strings of nerves.

     As I move within my book I am cut by pointed glass and broken bottles in which there is still the odor of sperm and perfume.

     More pages added to the book but pages like a prisoner's walking back and forth over the space alloted him. What is it allotted me to say?
— Anaïs Nin, House of Incest, p.62.