He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol ‘dog’ embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. Swift relates that the emperor of Lilliput could discern the movement of the minute hand; Funes could continuously discern the tranquil advances of corruption, of decay, of fatigue. He could note the progress of death, of dampness. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world. Babylon, London and New York have overwhelmed with their ferocious splendor the imaginations of men; no one, in their populous towers or their urgent avenues, has felt the heat and pressure of a reality as indefatigable as that which day and night converged upon the hapless Ireneo, in his poor South American suburb.

What had you expected of your pilgrimage, Person? A mere mirror rerun of hoary torments? Sympathy from an old stone? Enforced re-creation of irrecoverable trivia? A search for lost time in an utterly distinct sense from Good-grief’s dreadful “Je me souviens, je me souviens de la maison où je suis né” or, indeed, Proust’s quest? He had never experienced here (save once at the end of his last ascent) anything but boredom and bitterness. Something else had made him revisit dreary drab Witt.

Not a belief in ghosts. Who would care to haunt half-remembered lumps of matter (he did not know that Jacques lay buried under six feet of snow in Chute, Colorado), uncertain itineraries, a club hut which some spell prevented him from reaching and whose name anyway had got hopelessly mixed with “Draconite,” a stimulant no longer in production but still advertised on fences and even cliff walls? Yet something connected with spectral visitations had impelled him to come all the way from another continent. Let us make this a little clearer.

—that there is no mirage without a vanishing point—

Today all of them were at Lucinda’s house for a barbecue. There was everything you needed for a barbecue: a small plastic bucket full of mud. Everything.

She told her therapist it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of family and friends, loving it for a week or two, and then feeling trapped, dying to return to school, missing her roommates and her cute new boyfriend, the classes and the parties and the giggly talks before bed, understanding for the first time that that was her real life now, that this, despite everything she’d ever loved about it, was finished for good.

Imagine, for example, that the United States were a woman who has woken up from a 350-year nightmare. During this nightmare each and every cruelty of which a human person is capable has been performed. Performed relentlessly, for profit, for pleasure, to alleviate boredom, to punish others, and even, casting the tip of a whip all the way round the world until it strikes her own back, to punish herself. This woman wakes and tears herself from the grasp of these seductions. She has tossed in her bed all night long. She smells like sweat and her long hair is tangled. She washes herself and this takes away the smell of sweat, for the moment. She brushes her hair. The knots make this slow and painful work. She works the brush through her snags, gently and patiently at first but then, in frustration, violently. She yanks the brush through her hair, bearing the pain and accepting the strands of hair pulled out by their roots. Finally she looks like herself, how she would like to look: like someone who could not possibly have the nightmare she’s just had.

Combing tangled hair is terrible. Believing that there is a better version of yourself—one whom only pain and cold tears can reveal—is not a pleasant way to live. Unpleasant for a person, let alone a country. She is unlucky to have those nightmares and unlucky to have long hair that cannot be cut short. But as long as she can’t bear to cut her hair short, as long as she must look a certain way—like someone who couldn’t possibly have the nightmare she’s just had—this violence will be necessary. The violence in her nightmare, a violence no longer literally present, will force her to pull hairs from her head as she breaks through her snags. All in pursuit of appearances. Who can say if the pain of pulling out her hair doesn’t migrate into her scalp, pour through her skull and down into her brain, feeding the nightmares that wait there for her to sleep again? This is an analogy for how the progress of history—a progress we might naïvely have expected to produce nations who accumulate freedom, wisdom, and self-knowledge the way compound interest generates money—how this progress can be bent into a circle whose circuit must be endlessly walked.

In my experience even ordinary people, people whose desires and movements through life never came into anything like a blinding focus, even these people become contemplative to the point of silence as they approach death. I envy them their focus. I wish the baited hooks surrounding me in daily life were less tempting. I wish that death could more strongly broadcast itself from the moment in my future when it snips away all my possibilities. The ways I imagine my own death do no justice to the unbearable radiance of the real event. But my fantasies of death are fundamentally idle, and therefore only the shiniest of the several baited hooks I fall for. Depression is simply this hook when it is seated in your cheek. The line trails out of your mouth and up into the sky. Where it lays in the hand that holds the several neurochemical strings animating flesh. Anxiety is several octaves up from depression but the note it strikes is familiar. Where depression profanes the absolute and undivided truth of death, anxiety trades in failure, disgrace, shame, and destitution—the several social deaths it is possible to survive.