P53 She felt as though she were carrying her mother in her stomach and her mother had guffawed to spoil her meeting with Tomas.
This is a pretty psychoanalytical point of view, but I can totally feel empathy to it, as being a man who has his father in his stomach, trying to guffaw certain things in my life. Almost I can rewrite my life, which may be hopefully or not still on its half way, according to how I started fighting against and finally started accepting my father in my stomach.
P59 Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
Falling… Vertigo…
Before, I thought I had an insuperable longing to “fall” into where I had come from, comfortable and deadly boring place which was completely under the power of “Family.” Now I am not sure about this longing. My vertigo may be more toward anonymity now. Accepting the “Others” by being totally surrounded by the “Others.”
P61 She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo. “Pick me up,” is the message of a person who keeps falling.
Everybody has his or her own message which never changes whomever the message is directed to.
P67 They had been carefully briefed about how to behave if someone fired at them or threw stones, but they had received no directives about what to do when someone aimed a lens.
How have we been educated to react only to a certain thing only in a certain way. Probably now, many of us are educated for how to react to a lens since the construction of building our fantasy identity is so much based on the images through a lens. We simply need to do it as we have seen somewhere. It becomes almost a behavioral reflex reaction. We rather are loosing directives about what to do when someone standing in front of us.
…, the Russian invasion was not only a tragedy; it was a carnival of hate filled with a curious (and no longer explicable) euphoria.
Euphoria of tragedy. Euphoria of self-victimizing… As I have become more friends with people from pre-communist countries, I became more conscious of their psychological reactions toward the presentation of authority.