You too might have done this. No, you, of all people, my friend, must have. I say that not just because I relish the security of that belief as much as it pleases me to tease you. Rather, it is because to those among us who were school-age children in our neck of the woods in the 80s, when long nights without electricity were more a norm than an exception, this clandestine play in solitude must have presented itself as the most obvious indulgence. With fondness, we recollect it in middle age, possibly hoping to relive the child’s way of occupying time: those nocturnal hours spent playing with warm candle wax while we were supposed to be studying.
Didn’t you more than once begin humming to yourself while hypnotically staring at the flaming wick? Was that when the irresistible urge to peel off molten wax streaming down the candle stand would grip you? The mildly perverse delight of pressing it between your thumb and forefinger, first sensing the wet heat at its core, while letting its warmth seep into you, as it were, and then of making playthings in all sorts of shapes. And all of that, before the wax would cool off, only to repeat the process all over again. As your study corner swelled in that buttery amber, what were your thoughts? Or mine? Not the threat of exams anyway. Words and numbers surely could only peek now from under or around weird figurines littered in glorious disarray over the pages of the open notebook. And everything that caused anguish or anxiety must have long disappeared into the dark behind our young shoulders. Wasn’t that the case, more often than not?
*****
As far as I know, considering also the number of years that have gone by, it’s safe to assume that I’m not a pyromaniac. But one incident from early childhood where I witnessed a dizzying spectacle of fire stands out. I’m yet to figure out why that memory has stayed though, and which, I think, is one of the things we are trying to puzzle out.
The skies, it seems to me now, never let up those days. But that’s only what memory has soaked up. It must have actually transpired during either of the two dramatic monsoon seasons that visit Kerala every year. Standing at a window of my mother’s ancestral home, while my grandmother was probably gauging the possible duration and impact of the approaching downpour, we saw it strike. A zigzagging ribbon of light that descended so suddenly that in that moment nothing else seemed to exist. (One must give due credit to the early humans who associated the idea of divine revelation to lightning. An impenetrably turbid sky riven by an immense display of lightning, what else could that jaw-dropping spectacle ignite against the terror of helplessness?) Anyway, it struck one of the several coconut trees before the old house.
But what I recall with greater immediacy is the image of us watching by the window, and not the scene that unfolded as a separate entity. In what must have been a few startled minutes, the tree had turned into a spire on fire which caused it to break in the middle. Snapped clean, like a twig off a bush. The shy drizzle that followed resembled a weak apology, perfunctorily offered. It did little else than releasing that smell, an ‘after-smell’ which I would instantly recognise later, wet but set off by fire. Nothing remained of the tree of course. And what else has been retained of that incident is another accident. Perhaps it was only an involuntary reflex reaction. Or, an expression of a more concrete sentiment maybe. She had, any which way, hastily pulled me to her body, and pressed my head sideways to her paunch. I call her response an accident because it is one of the few memories I have of my grandmother where she seemed genuine, even warm.
*****
A few weeks ago, I came across a compiled copy of Gustave Doré’s illustrations for The Divine Comedy at a bookstore about which I have already sung reams of praise to you. Considering how deeply entrenched in our vocabulary are phrases like, ‘ordeal by fire’, ‘burning in hell’ etc., even though we use it more to refer to earthly tribulations, I was surprised to find so few images of fire in it. Yes, there are a few depicting a rain of fire, lightning, or smoking tombs. But largely, fire cannot be said to be the ultimate element of this imagination. But then, why does fire have the peculiar place it has in everyday language?
A philosopher with a keen interest in the poetics of human reverie like Gaston Bachelard has much to say on this matter:
“The warm sense of well-being arising from physical love must have been transferred into many primitive experiences. To set fire to a stick by sliding it up and down in the groove in the piece of dry wood takes time and patience. But this work must have been very agreeable to an individual whose reverie was wholly sexual. It was perhaps while engaged in this gentle task that man learned to sing. In any case, it is an obviously rhythmic kind of task, a task which answers to the rhythm of the worker, which brings him lovely, multiple resonances: the arm that rubs, the pieces of wood that strike together, the voice that sings, all are united in the same harmony and the same increase in energy; everything converges on to the one hope, on to an objective whose value is known….It is really the whole being that is engaged in play. It is in this play rather than in some form of suffering that the primitive being finds self-awareness, which in the first place is self-confidence” [i].
If that weren’t enough, in a sentence which has the impact of a whiplash, he says, “[t]he human mind did not begin its development like a class in physics”, and thereby characterises fire as “the first cause of the phenomenon” [ii]. Because, he adds, “we cannot speak of a world of the phenomenon, of a world of the appearances, except in the presence of a world which changes in its appearances” and the mark fire leaves behind on a substance is so swift, perceptible, and definitive [iii]. From an altogether different tangent, Jennifer Hecht imagines that the fiercest incitement towards art, philosophy and mythology for the early humans might have come from the enigma of moving celestial bodies located so far away, but illuminating their nights [iv]. All that is surely speculative. But maybe, as Bachelard surmises, something of the primitive experience of fire, its entrancement, is still alive in the subconscious of warm-blooded bipeds. Even for those of us who live in the tropics, warmth, anyway, is much more than a physical property of fire. Still that’s only one layer of the mystery.
*****
Fire certainly works as a symbol for several sensations. We continue to speak of a whole range of the stronger among human passions as something that smoulders, or as a burning fever that consumes the person, and/or sends shivers to their fingertips. How else would one talk about the tingling intoxication of desire, for example? And as a native of Kerala, I can vouch for how deep its salience has collectively been for evoking revolutionary zeal. But with the same reliance, we also use the imagery of fire to speak of less stormy emotions.
Isn’t it the case that some rare people strike us as themselves in almost everything they do? To describe them, we tend to fall back on analogies drawn from the properties of natural elements, don’t we? Especially those of fire. Maybe that’s so because the elements, much more vigorously than anything else that populates nature, have the enduring double significance in language as both metaphor and the real thing. And among them, as something that spreads light, fire remains the first reference point for truth across time. The elements, anyhow, don’t need to be qualified from the outside with authenticity because that quality they already possess in all their varied forms. But fire instinctively, mysteriously leaps to imagination, warming the cockles of the heart, as it were, when we think of them.
Bachelard might lead us here again since he calls fire “the ultra-living element”: “Among all phenomena, it is really the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil” [v]. And that’s so because, as a stand in at once for the intimate and the universal, for gentleness and torture, cookery and apocalypse, and so on, it can contradict itself [vi]. To us, inescapably divided creatures, that should hold some value, even when unconsciously used, even if we deny our discrepancies for whatever ends.
I suppose that explains why while we talk of the truth of a person as something that shines in his/her eyes, it is so hard to think of reality as a fireplace. And that might be because reality, intimidating by its overabundance in the face of any human attempt to measure it, cannot be thought of as a controlled fire, unless one is a Hegelian that is. (That snide remark, I hope, doesn’t give you the impression that I have drunk deep of Hegel’s philosophy. Forking my way through his thoughts usually makes me want to tear out my own hair, since his, I cannot.)
Maybe when it comes to affections, whether for a book or a person, as long as they are mightily sensed, and where logic doesn’t matter much, we are all poets. And poets in their finest insights have often reached summits of human imagination, unveiling possibilities of thought and reflection (and its failures?) before the philosophers, and without their penchant for abstractions.
*****
But what do we mean by the authenticity of a person? A dictionary would define ‘authenticity’ as ‘the quality of being true or real’. But when we talk about those who seem authentic to us, it’s an apprehension subjectively arrived at like poetic truth, isn’t it [vii]? Something intensely sensed from without, even if it happens to coincide with the other person’s actuality at that point in time. And, certainly, it might mean several things depending on the viewing subject’s preferences, predilections, and prejudices. For one who is hilariously insecure and shy in social interactions, it applies to those few people before whom one’s psychological defences drop away, although not completely perhaps. I might be generalising but it has seemed to me too many times that they have had a good enough look into themselves. Or, is it that whenever they try, it fills them with disgust that their eyes would inevitably be drawn to the face peering down with an all-too-neatly-gleaming ring behind it, and only later to the dark dampness that’s actually down there? Shame, any which way, isn’t something that matters much in their company, even when their ironic mirror conjures up one’s pretensions and vanities.
*****
Now, my grandmother has always seemed to represent the inverse to the above kind. And that, it must be admitted, is because I had eyes (and ears) only for her husband who I used to follow around, like the tiny dog from the satiric comic series created by the great V. T. Thomas (or ‘Toms’ as he is gratefully remembered), and avidly read once by children and (some) adults in Kerala. Try as I might, I cannot recall many instances where she took some interest in how another person saw any matter at hand. One of the videos a cousin had made in and around their home in the first half of the 90s, and which I happened to watch recently only reinforces that impression.
The living room, somehow called ‘portico’ then, is buzzing with activity. Discussions about the arrangements to be made for a wedding in the family are going on, often interrupted by more mundane matters that stray into it, and demand immediate attention. I caught a brief glimpse of me as a 17 or 18-year-old, sitting next to my mother. In a miserable attempt to not disappear into the framed, black-and-white photos on the wall, I’m echoing, rather illustrating, whatever my mother has just said. And what’s more, with my oil-licked hair, I look as alive as a piece of deep-fried, but half-burnt sardine. (It must also be said that I find these ‘blasts from the past’ dislocating because it is as self-assuring as the world Brendan Fraser’s Adam discovers when he comes out of his bunker, with no chance of running into Alicia Silverstone’s Eve, dolled up in her Mary Pickford curls, who happens to know her way around.) But there the old man— I have no first-hand conception of him other than that of a retired old man who, as per my mother’s stories, had a long, but ordinary career as a policeman prior to that— is present as well. Tucked into a corner and, half-hidden behind the open front door, the quietest person in that room. He is staring at the day’s newspaper. Or, maybe only pretending to read it, having already disentangled himself from the meandering conversation, while grandmother plays the busy-bee, or more exactly, the queen-bee, expecting everyone to cluck after her, although the power structure of the household has already shifted, with its reins in the hands of her favourite daughter (my aunt) and, as per the rumour mill, her not-so-favoured son-in-law.
This impression of her, however, was gathered over the years, and augmented by other people’s memories of her manipulative ways, as by hearsays. But I don’t think it was a value system that determined who a child would instinctively turn to. I kept out of her way rather because being around her was as much fun as watching paint dry on a wall. Grandfather, on the other hand, hadn’t let pressures of propriety rob him off his child’s delight in simple things, although his ways, many would agree, were outlandish. That many of his jokes— one of which was that a mango tree within the premises was capable of magic, that its logs had a sap which would turn his hair, so like milkweed fuzz, jet-black one day, and which, in fact, was a covert reference to his funeral pyre— typically crude, often pithy, and sometimes both at once, went right over my head then, is another matter. But keeping out of grandmother’s way meant that I wasn’t interested in her as well. That late discernment notwithstanding, I still consider her insufferable except in my most charitable moments, and too little spontaneous warmth her memory inspires.
*****
Now that we are nose-deep in this tattle, it’s hard to not wonder how decisive the work of these early affinities has been in later years. And that reminds me of an older friend whom I cannot say I have thought about a lot of late. I say a friend, but I met him only once, other than running into him at some gathering a couple of years earlier. Although once a journalist who had written extensively on politics, movies and sports, after retiring from mainstream Malayalam media, he kept referring to himself, mock-seriously perhaps, as a member of the ‘non-working class’. In his room— his world had already shrunk into that room I think— that lay submerged in a dense cloud of marijuana smoke, with books almost quavering in teetering towers in a corner, while one or two lay face-down and forgotten on the floor, I had no pressure to talk. He was going on and on about what I don’t remember now. But his sister, who looked both effortlessly elegant and wise, I certainly remember, lingered at the door like an embarrassment too gluey for comfort. She seemed to be struggling to decide who among the three of us she felt most sorry for that afternoon.
Anyway, to cut to the chase, I came to know of his death two years after his passing. I had removed myself from social media while living/dying in Kolkata. While I still don’t know what corrosive malaise had beset him, a common friend has the theory that he had withdrawn too much into himself, estranging even his closest friends. At his funeral, which was a quiet affair apparently, the same few friends made the best of the situation as if they were just hanging out as before. A funny, kind man is how I recall him, although in his last days, I’m told, he was neither.
And then there is she. When the desperation of various discarded projects takes hold of me— those being my ‘bright-as-a-buttonhole’ moments, right when it also means luxuriating in that despair— it’s more than nice to think that she is not another dead friend. That’s so because I entertain the thought that she exists more fully than me. Is that why she has denied herself a proxy life on social media? Or is the former thought drawn from the latter? The backstory, anyway, is that as bench mates we had met, while pursuing what must be the stupidest professional course in the world. And by a play of chance, she and I were assigned to work as teacher trainees at the same school. (That, by the way, is the only duration of that course when one actually learns anything.) Hugely pregnant that I was, I had difficulty climbing the stairs, and she would walk alongside, carrying the teaching aids we were expected to bring along, hers along with mine, taking each step as slowly as possible, as if she too were pregnant. Oh yes, she also cleared my name when one of the employees, baffled by this morning ritual, had asked her if I was a (fat) cripple.
But we lost touch soon after the course, lost as we probably were in the steady drip of life. Ending up in middle age together in the lost and found (or is it found and lost?) department must be a minor miracle. Oddly enough, and although for different reasons, hers probably more valid than mine, we both had stopped stepping out of home for work roughly at the same time, though unbeknownst to each other. That’s a coincidence, and not a recipe for better living. She, anyway, began translating random works in English to Malayalam at some point. But she has too much on her plate, too many responsibilities, to spend time quibbling about, well, nothing in particular. And, that she makes lists in all seriousness like ‘what god can do for her’, and ‘what she can do for herself’, but also talks about it as if it makes her feel silly, is another mystery to one who mumbles prayers only at the most helpless moments.
*****
So, my absconding friend, there the bias is: mine, in favour of people who do not meddle too much in other people’s affairs, or those who do not put themselves out there a lot. It is perhaps ironic that one both respects that choice, and seeks their friendship. Ironic also that irrespective of my reticent shrinking into myself, I revel in thinking up bakwas (like why dusting a fan, and dusting a cake are opposite activities, or why chopsticks should be called ‘chompsticks’), and have no problem to take it to Facebook (or to a ramble), not to mention to post selfies. I would even validate it with the reckless justification that since one is expected to be anguished about words, one might have some harmless fun at the expense of the ways of words as well. But the inwardness of such people which, I suppose, is different among themselves as it is different from mine, I cannot say I have mapped out. All that can be said is that as those few who seem to exist not just as derivatives of a pre-packaged something which is accorded general recognition and approval, they and their ilk are my beacons. But when I drag in the imagery of light— given that it’s a well-worn cliché by now, even though that is how I sense it— it doesn’t mean that the rare creatures in the list above, which I have left incomplete, are invariable epitomes of good sense, or chaste deeds. They too must have erred, hurt others, or taken weak decisions. But they seem real, and hence authentic, the way characters in a fine book seem real. With unpolished edges. A potential catastrophe, but often capable of grace and decency as well. As for whether anomalies should necessarily translate into something that is treasurable— a cannibal, for example, although an extreme case, is an anomaly— I leave that to you for consideration. One still yields to the seduction of this will-o’-the-wisp for the simple reason that it doesn’t feel like a chore.
*****
In a recent article that takes off from an analogical consideration of the accented English used in the movie House of Gucci – which is meant to sound like Italian as spoken by native speakers— and lands on a contemporary predicament, Paul Doolan considers the pursuit of authenticity, and goes on to argue that it often devolves into absurdity instead [viii]. He talks about how the very systems that crush individuality (not a reference to Ridley Scott’s film) have usurped this ideal, popularising the hoax that all that is required is submission to the demands of such systems. The means towards this end could be anything: yoga, courses that teach mindfulness, trips to exotic locations to de-stress, and so forth. Wherein, it is made out to be a linear journey that cannot help drawing one closer to the promise of success and self-fulfilment. Thus, as far as its heft both in contemporary self-help and wellness industry, as well as its employment as a collective pursuit sponsored by the corporate sector towards self-realisation is concerned, the cloaking of this ideal in the vocabulary of positivity and liberation, that fruit which is always dangled at a distance in the future, cannot help looking absurd, and, too often, he says, it results in burnout. I don’t know if, including the pursuit of art, or the practice of politics, much remains that isn’t hijacked by some kind of corporate or other. I could be wrong there. But I’m inclined to believe John Ashbery when he writes that “[A] talent for self-realisation/will get you only as far as the vacant lot/next to the lumber yard, where they have roll call”, and where a group of people standing in a huddle could either be the beginning of a queue or not, and where, before you have a chance to find out, someone might bark at you, “Didn’t/they teach you/anything at school? That a photograph/of anything can be real, or maybe not [ix]?”
*****
No, I am not exhorting anyone to shun the world. Exhortations are tedious and overrated anyhow. But now, let’s have a view from elsewhere. And that, I sheepishly admit, is the result of an unplanned experiment. Let’s blame it on one of Michel Houellebecq’s protagonists since he is the one who got you and I mired in this muck in the first place. He had nudged me to look up the works of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against the Grain in particular. So the ‘nut-popped-out-of-its-shell’ point is that he praises Huysmans for being truly present in his works, for his voice which isn’t just a place-holder for the ruling spirit of his time. He then teases that quality out of its easy-to-ignore hole, so to speak, as one that is too often side-lined among commonly praised aspects of the experience of literature.
And here is the experiment in which I got myself enmeshed without premeditation. I happened to be reading Huysmans along with Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. In the company of two characters from two time-places who remove themselves from the busy business of the world while seeking a cure for their respective maladies— one through solipsistic debauchery, the other via substance abuse— I ended up asking Theo what in the world could it mean in juxtaposition. Theo, as usual, responded with his classic Bill Murray stare.
To complicate matters further, that being another indulgence we both seem to enjoy as long as it makes the kitchen clock tick away unobtrusively, I began making a list of characters familiar to me who do something similar, or find themselves stranded in comparable circumstances at some point in the respective narratives, though their lives are steeped in worlds endowed with their own particular genius that probably does not invite a collation of this sort. But here are some worthy candidates who resurfaced in memory, and found their place in my list, to which I’m sure you would have more to add: ‘The Underground Man’, Sasha Jansen, Antoine Roquentin, ‘Strauch the painter’, Billy Biswas, and Abani Chatterjee, apart from Jean Des Esseintes and the unnamed protagonist of Moshfegh’s book. This might read like a foregone conclusion to you. So, please feel free to insert the cuss word that you mouth most often after the following statement. The discovery sadly amounted to a non-discovery when combed together: it doesn’t end very well for any of them. Maybe it never ends well either way. I see you grinning in wry amusement now, a grin that’s midway on the spectrum from the one last week, when you grimaced after scalding your tongue with the first sip of your morning tea.
*****
And, before I forget, remember that lovely sketch of a little boy with droopy eyes, (like yours?) sitting by a stream? The one that you too must have come across while dopily scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed? The words underneath the doodle say with absolutely no malice to sit quietly and listen to the babble of that stream. Yes, the very act of staring at that picture calms. And a child, I suppose, can stretch such non-activity to massive proportions on a daily basis. But not the older, demented creatures among us I fear. I don’t remember where I read that we like being in nature because it has no opinion of us. That aside, there is the ugly realisation which usually arrives too late. That, if one is the kind that loses the mind when in the thick of things for too long, when left to oneself over a span of time that turns viscous, and bereft of the numbing opioid of structure, a routinised structure, of slotting oneself into some ritualised pursuit or other, one could still go mad.
Yes, one hears one’s thoughts better in solitude. But why is it repeatedly made out to be a slam dunk blessing? Often, unless one’s thoughts are invariably unsullied, it’s a bane in the same breath. That is probably why it is such an essential condition for writing though not lastingly healthy for the human who strings words together. Occasional escapes apart, no permanent vacation seems to be on the cards, or in tea leaves. Thomas Mann’s ageing writer-protagonist, Gustav von Ashenbach, a solitary creature by will, but not a cypher, stripped off all dignity until the very end of the story, thus mulls over the problem: “The fruit of solitude is originality, something daringly and disconcertingly beautiful, the poetic creation. But the fruit of solitude can also be the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd, the forbidden” [x].
One might feel that one is a total fake when divested of the inclination to tap into one’s thoughts. And if reflexivity is an inexcusable aspect of the pursuit of the ideal in question here, there is also the dreadful chance that instead of winnowing the chaff, it might tip one over into grotesquery or hideousness. The same way candour in a writer’s voice or a painter’s brush strokes can slide into an empty style, which issues forth not from genuine probing, but the desire to sound/look different which is tantalising by itself. Sasha Jansen in one of her zombie-like shambles in alcoholic stupor calls that desire an abomination anyway, and she’s referring to herself when she says that.
Perhaps the person who exiles himself/herself from the normative world of respectable or recognisable actions is already internally dislocated, even before the process of elimination finds its shape in physical removal from that world. But the banished world might still seep in through the slats of their hideout’s windows or the cracks in its floorboards. Even in cases where it is not a narrated fact in which the world returns to lay its claim on the escapee, with its emissaries being convinced of their benevolence, and indeed, sometimes they are. The intervention in the latter case can be of another kind, almost imperceptible. For, outside of the social systems that decide what values matter, and what do not, and in the absence of analogies to shore up some idea of a bearably decent self, or a witness who might perhaps recognise its pathology, there’s little chance for anything but slow disintegration. I don’t know what Dostoevsky’s thoughts were when he wrote the final pages of the Notes. There is that infernal cry anyway, which, despite his protagonist’s fuming tirade against the world, is a terrible confession, terrible because it must be as true as true gets to be, at least to him: “They won’t let me…I can’t be…good [xi]!” Authenticity can then not only look absurd, it can also result in abjection. The maw that yawns then is rapacious.
*****
But one final niggle. Bachelard, with the importance he attaches to wellbeing— which, when it manifests through the immersion of the whole being in play he regards as crucial for self-awareness not exclusively to early humans, and which happily echoes with the enduring value he attributes elsewhere to nooks and corners for solitary reverie or daydreaming in human dwelling places— seems to stand on the opposite side of this quandary. Self-awareness, surely, is not the discovery of the crystalised, even if soot-covered rock already there, but a perpetual, fumbling process. And even though everything nameable and unnameable has had mind-numbingly countless proliferations in our times, including that of the range of available palliatives, one doubts if we are any more successful than the early humans when it comes to erecting lasting bulwarks against what ails the mind. But the desire for well-being, I suppose, is perennial.
Then, the same way one feels the need to run away from routine to sit in silence somewhere, the same way the sweet surrender to art revitalises one, one also needs occasional reprieves from the chosen kind of isolation, whatever form it might take. And if one hopes that being an anomaly doesn’t result in internal anomie, one still needs company or connection at least in imagination. The enchantment, no matter how mysterious, of the pathways that lead to others who walked the road before one, or to those who have somehow deepened one’s own existence just by their presence, no matter how temporary, no matter how remote. Their ironic laughter at the whole shebang which, because it often has the same source as their affliction, makes one mutter words of gratitude in silence just for having come across it. And if they aren’t dead yet, for that too.
But of course, this hope might be the last glimmering ember of despair as well since that which gives light might also burn. And what it involves perhaps is only a choice to be consumed by “either fire or fire”. But what if, that is when “the fire and the rose are one” [xii]?
*****
Endnotes
[i] Bachelard, Gaston. The Psychoanalysis of Fire, translated by Alan C. M. Ross, Beacon Press, 1964, p. 28.
[ii] Ibid, p.57.
[iii] Ibid, p.57.
[iv] Hecht, Jennifer Micheal. Doubt: A History. Harper, 2003.
[v] Bachelard, Gaston. The Psychoanalysis of Fire, translated by Alan C. M. Ross, Beacon Press, 1964, p. 7.
[vi] Ibid. p. 7.
[vii] Jacquette, Dale. “Thirst for Authenticity: An Aesthetics of the Brewer’s Art”, Beer and Philosophy: The Unexamined Beer isn’t Worth Drinking. Blackwell, 2007.
[viii] Doolan, Paul. “Authenticity and Absurdity”, Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas. Issue: 163, Aug/Sep, 2024,
https://philosophynow.org/issues/163/Authenticity_and_Absurdity#:~:text=We%20compulsively%20search%20for%20authenticity,fake%20news%20and%20conspiracy%20theories.
[ix] Ashbery, John. “Life is a Dream”, Your Name Here: Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/jul/31/poem-of-the-week-life-is-a-dream-by-john-ashbery.
[x] Mann, Thomas. “Death in Venice”, Death in Venice and Other Stories, translated by David Luke. Vintage: 1998, p. 218.
[xi] Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground, translated by Mira Ginsburg. Bantam Classic, 1974.
[xii] Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding”, Four Quartets. Faber and Faber, 2001, p. 43. (The title of this essay is stolen from the above poem as well, from Eliot’s phrase “[t]he intolerable shirt of flame” on page 42 of the same edition.
