Damon’s Reviews > The Secret History > Status Update

I was acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day; the sky a deep painful blue, wind scattering the red and yellow leaves in a whirlwind of confetti. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. Someone-- was it van Gogh?-- said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty. Terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.

I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu, but somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of that particular shade.

But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? Is it a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own? Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us?

There is to me about this place the smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death-- those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call 'miasma", defilement-- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death."