Writing in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

communities—are not only efficiently protected and fortressed against our enemies, but in some ways also protected—meaning, we protect ourselves— from any Other . From the projection of the Other’s internality onto ourselves; from the way this internality is demandingly and constantly thrown at us; from something that I will call “the chaos within the Other.”
    “Hell is other people,” said Sartre, and perhaps our fear of the hell that exists in others is the reason that the paper-thin layer of skin that envelops us and separates us from others is sometimes as impervious as any fortified wall or border.

    If we observe those around us, we will find that even between couples who have lived together for decades—who have lived more or less happily, and who love each other and function well as parents and as a family—there can often be, almost instinctively and unwittingly, a complex unspoken agreement (whose application, incidentally, requires a most sophisticated and nuanced form of collaboration!), the main tenet of which is that it is best not to know one’s partner through and through. Not to be exposed to all that happens within him. And not to recognize these “occurrences” or name them explicitly, because they have no place within the framework of the couple’s relationship, and they might even tear the relationship apart from the inside and bring it crashing down, something neither partner desires.
    (“It is only now so clear to me,” writes one man, in one book— Be My Knife , a novel with which I had a complicated couplehood—“that my life with my wife, our love, is so stable and defined that it is impossible to add a new element that is too large, like myself, for instance.”)
    Sometimes I look at a couple that has been together for a long time—there are quite a few whom I know; you may have come across some too—and I perform a little exercise of thought and imagination: I try to see what they were like at the moment they were created as a couple. I try to remove all the layers of time and age and weariness and routine, and then I can see them young and fresh, and so innocent. Sometimes I can also observe how, at the moment of their “pollination” as a couple,
they seemed to conduct a silent dialogue, like one subconscious talking to another, in which they promptly agreed on the angles in which they would view each other for the rest of their lives, thus instantly entering a complicated life pact, wondrous in its complexity and subtle mechanisms. They may also have determined that their love would always win, at any cost. Because there is always a price to pay for not seeing the person closest to us from all possible angles, not seeing all his sides and all his shadows. There is a price to pay when we animate in our partner—and when our partner animates in himself—only certain “areas of the soul,” which are defined and agreed upon, and therefore restricted.
    A similar process occurs, of course, between parents and children. Sometimes, especially when we are very young, it is not easy for us to see our parents from a broad angle. It may also be uncomfortable for us to accept that our parents are “entitled” to their own internal chaos. That Mom and Dad too have not only souls but also—horror of horrors!—a right to their own “psychology.” And that they too had mothers and fathers, and that those parents, in their day, did things that left wounds and scars and aberrations in our parents.
    Perhaps the most difficult thing is to expose ourselves to the darkness we often sense in our children, particularly when they are young and tender. It is difficult to admit to ourselves that even in those delicate, innocent souls there may be a dark chasm, whence threatening desires and urges and foreignness and madness may
erupt. As a parent, I can attest that even the thought of this is intolerable, perhaps chiefly because of the guilt it arouses.
    We can also find this sort of