For Love and Beauty, a photo by Artotem on Flickr.
p. 57
'Their helplessness, passivity, vulnerability is our own. We all yearn toward the state of inanition, the condition of harmlessness, where we are perforce lovable and fragile. It is only by great effort that we rouse ourselves to act, to fight, to struggle, to be heard above the wind ... To behave like live people.
... the contest between the two principles that hedge human existence. In his poem 'Sheep' Ted Hughes writes ...
Death was more interesting to him.
Life could not get his attention.
Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary for our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it. The two principles work in covert concert; though in most of us Eros dominates, in none of us is Thanatos completely subdued.'
Picador, Australia, 1994
Janet Malcolm: A life in writing
