You should say everything that comes into your head.
Freud, ‘On Initiating Treatment’ (1913)
There are things it’s better not to dwell on, things it’s normal to forget. The people who are starving or being tortured, the animals that live a life of hell to feed us, the unimaginable extension of the universe, or universes, the impersonality of the statistical laws to which our personal behaviour conforms, oblivion. On the edge of infinite nothingness we go about our trivial business: book holidays, see to the new tax disc for the car, shop for the weekend at Sainsbury’s. This is reality, normality, health. Forgetting makes us robust. A whiff of anaesthetic before we start the day does us a world of good. Those who can’t forget we call madmen or artists.
One of the many scandalous realities we choose to ignore because we cannot assimilate it is the fact of unexpressed thought. Consider it. Next time you are sitting at dinner with friends or people you don’t yet know, stop for a moment and listen out for the inaudible murmur of concealed thoughts: the things going through your head that you are not speaking, the things going through the heads of the others. On the bus, in a Tube carriage filled with silent strangers, at the breakfast table with your loved ones, in the office or the pub: remember how the secret thoughts are swarming, seething; chattering like millions of bats in an underground cave, rustling beneath the surface of the day like cockroaches.
Now and again, unintentionally or by chance, the secret thoughts slip out. You have guests staying: nice, kind, ingenuous and well-meaning people, who are also rather boring. They have left the room and without thinking you blurt out too loudly to your partner: ‘God, what bores they are!’ Then you see that the window is open and you realise that they are in the room above you and will have their window open too because it’s summer and they will almost certainly have heard you, and they are staying for another three days. Or you phone an old friend and get the answering machine: it’s the simpering voice of your friend’s unbearable wife telling you to leave a message, and out loud you curse her, calling her an arrogant bitch, but the beep is much more sudden than you expect and you realise you’ve been recorded. Such moments are small catastrophes, and the only way we have of dealing with them is to behave as though they had never happened or persuade ourselves that their impact is less dreadful than it really is.
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