(no subject)

   "I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.
     Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake... Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.
     Quickly you make rash decision. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression has triumphed over you.
     The matter is difficult to put into words... it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you."


"Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed. A school of fish appeared around the net or a knot cried out to be reknotted... The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving."

from 'Life of Pi', by Yann Martel.