Island of the Mad by Laurie Sheck

Author:Laurie Sheck
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028654
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2016-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

Last night after I left her, I dreamed I picked up Dostoevsky’s book, but it was covered with black cloth and suffered a seizure in my hands. How could I not have noticed this before?—that in a sense the whole book is one long seizure. I’ve been reading it for weeks, holding it in my hands close to my eyes—and yet I missed this. Beneath the black cloth I could feel the spreading heat of its suffering, the light a dazzling hurt inside it.

Pilate sat with his dog in the cold moonlight, the air flooding with the scent of roses. He didn’t know if he was on his terrace overlooking the flat plain, or in exile in some foreign land, or maybe in a prison by the sea. It had been decades since he’d spoken. “There is no safety of the mind,” he thought, his temples pounding in the blood-red light. He couldn’t tell if his head was bare or covered. Red wind made small incisions on his skin. Then he thought further: “In Sanskrit safety means whole, and in my language it means intact, undamaged, surviving, extant, still holding. Xenophon wrote: ‘to be safe of mind, to be wise.’ So to say a safe mind is to indicate a mind that is sane. But I think that is a vain, ridiculous wish”—he wanted to rub his right temple, but his hands hung heavily at his sides—“thinking is never safe, there is nothing more perilous in the world.”

The red air turned suddenly pale, the roses faded—

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