Memories of an Epidemic

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Libra was difficult to manage. Everyone knew that. It was because he lived in two different worlds. One was the outer world of other people. Otto Rank, Freud’s real son, says somewhere that reality is everything that resists a person’s will. Reality, the world of other people, resisted Libra’s will at every turn. The other world was the inner one. In that world nothing resisted Libra’s will. Then again, nothing in it was real: He was 40 years old, he had been writing since he was 16, and nothing he wrote had ever been published. His genius was unrecognized. The contrast between these worlds made Libra hard to manage. He was obsequious in the face of the world, as helpless as if he was unreal, without power or form. At the same time he had contempt for the world and everything in it, as if it was the thing that was unreal. He was above the world, mightier than it was, stronger than Time. He never knew which attitude to indulge at any given moment. His life flickered between them: self-abasing and self-glorying, high up and very low, full and then empty.

John Benditt on Northwest Review

Memories of an Epidemic