[b]Shirley Jackson
Fear is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns.[/b]
Not counting all the fears that aren’t of course.
The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable.
Or [of course]: The gap between the philosophy she wrote and the philosophy she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable. At least I suspect as much.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her.
It isn’t fair, she said.
A stone hit her on the side of the head.
Lots of villages like that, aren’t there?
Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.
Of course most pointless violence isn’t really the point at all, is it?
Margaret stood all alone at her first witch-burning. She had on her new blue cap and her sister’s shawl, and she stood by herself, waiting. She had long ago given up on finding her sister and brother-in-law in the crowd, and was now content to watch alone. She felt a very pleasant fear and a crying excitement over the burning; she had lived all her life in the country and now, staying with her sister in the city, she was being introduced to the customs of society.
Custom. The first objectivism we might call it.
He was scrupulous about the use of his title because, his investigations being so utterly unscientific, he hoped to borrow an air of respectability, even scholarly authority, from his education.
So, who does this remind you of, Satyr?