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“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”

—Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Sophistication

If you want to appear deep

Quote House of Leaves

If you want to feel deep

Read House of Leaves

If you want to get lost

Immerse yourself in House of Leaves

If you want to sleep soundly at night

Burn House of Leaves

But you can’t unremember

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share." ”

—“House of Leaves”, Mark Z. Danielewski

Mark Z. Danielewski (author of House of Leaves) on fear:

I’ll simplify: anger is always a result of fear. Period. Anger is one way to respond to fear. I say one way because responses are categorically multiple.

Now you may know someone who says he’s never been afraid. (I say “he” because typically—though this is not always the case—men are the ones willing to make such a ridiculous claim.) Well if you ask this guy if he’s ever been angry, he’ll probably say sure. Hell, he’ll probably brag about it. But if you’re angry, you’re afraid. I don’t care if it’s road rage or a response to a parental barb or how strange a new book looks. If you felt the stir of anger, something scared you.

Of course all this is not earth-shattering stuff. It’s as old as the hills. But sometimes this knowledge gets misplaced. The rush anger gives us, the sense of power and possibility, is so powerful we forget the origins. We forget that we’re really high on the product of our own internal chemical lab. It’s a pretty sophisticated lab too.

So I’m encouraged by the trend towards Smart Horror because it suggests on a cultural level that there’s a desire to get past the Anger Response and deal with a much more heroic question: what am I afraid of? And why? And how should I respond?

After all, maybe what we’re so frightened of will turn out to be nothing more than a dark, empty room. Then again, maybe it won’t. 


“When revisiting places we once frequented as children, it is not unusual to observe how much smaller everything seems. The experience has too often been attributed to the physical differences between a child and adult. In fact is has more to do with the epistemological dimensions than with bodily dimensions; knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space.”

—House of Leaves

You’ll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won’t matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how. You’ll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place.

Old shelters—television, magazines, movies—won’t protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That’s when you’ll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you’ve walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.

You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You’ll care only about the darkness and you’ll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you’re some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you’ll be afraid to look away, you’ll be afraid to sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You’ll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you’ll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you’ve got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.’

- House Of Leaves 

“ "I start filling caps with purple, concentrating on its texture, the strange hue, imagining I can actually observe the rapid pulse of it's bandwidth. These are stupid thoughts, and as if to confirm that sentiment, darkness pushes in on me. Suddenly the slash of light on my hands looks sharp enough to cut me. Real sharp. Move and it will cut me. I do move and guess what? I start to bleed. The laceration isn't deep but important stuff has been struck, leaking over the table and floor. Lost. I don't have long. Except I'm not bleeding though I am breathing hard. Real hard. I don't need to touch my face to know there are now beads of sweat slipping off my forehead, flicking off my eyelids, streaming down the back of my neck. Cold as hands. Hands of the dead. Something terrible is going on here. Going extremely wrong. Get out, I think. I want to get out. But I can't move. Then as if this were nothing but a grim prelude, shit really starts to happen. There's that awful taste again, sharp as rust, wrapping around my tongue. Worse, I'm no longer alone. Impossible. Not impossible. This time it's human. Maybe not. Extremely long finger. A sucking sound too. Sucking on teeth, teeth already torn from the gums. I don't know how I know this. But it's already too late, I've seen the eyes. The eyes. They have no whites. I haven't seen this. The way they glisten they glisten red. Then it begins reaching for me, slowly unfolding itself out of its corner, mad meat all of it, but I understand. These eyes are full of blood. Except I'm only looking at shadows and shelves. Of course, I'm alone. And then behind me, the door closes. The rest is in pieces. A scream, a howl, a roar. All's warping, or splintering. That makes no sense. There's a terrible banging. The air's rank with stench. At least that's not a mystery. I know the source. Boy, do I ever. I've shit myself. Pissed myself too. I can't believe it. Urine soaking into my pants, fecal matter running down the back of my legs, I'm caught in it, must run and hide from it, but I still can't move. In fact, the more I try to escape, the less I can breathe. The more I try to hold on, the less I can focus. Something's leaving me. Parts of me. Everything falls apart. Stories heard but not recalled. Letters too. Words filling my head. Fragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like syllables, flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp. Cracked. Traveling at murderous speed. Tearing through it all in a very, very bad perhaps irreparable way. Known. Some. Call. Is. Air. Am? Incoherent-yes. Without meaning-I'm afraid not. The shape of a shape of a face dis(as)sembling right before my eyes. What wail embattled break. Like a hawk. Another Maldon or no Maldon at all, on snowy days, or not snowy at all, for beyond the edge of any reasonable awareness. This is what it feels like to be really afraid. Though of course it doesn't. None of this can truly approach the reality of that fear, there in the midst of all that bedlam, like the sound of a heart or some other unholy blast, desperate & dying, slamming, no banging into the thing wall of my inner ear, paper thin in fact, attempting to shatter inside what had already been shattered long ago. I should be dead. Why am I still here? And as that question appears-concise, in order, properly accented-I see I'm holding onto the tray loaded with all those caps and bottles of black and purple ink. Not only that but I'm already walking as fast as I can through the doorway. The door is open though I did not open it. I stub my toe. I'm falling down the stairs, tripping over myself, hurling the tray in the air, the caps, the ink, all of it, floating now above me, as my hands, independent of anything I might have thought to suggest, reach up to protect my head. Something hisses and slashes out at the back of my neck. It doesn't matter. Down I go, head first, somersaulting down those eight pretty steep steps, a wild blur, leaving me to passively note the pain spots as they happen: shoulders, hip, elbows, even as I also, at the same time, remain dimly aware of so much ink coming down like a bad rain, splattering around me, everywhere, covering me, even the tray hitting me, though that doesn't hurt, the caps scattering across the floor, and of course the accompanying racket, telling my boss, telling them all, whoever else was there- What? not that it was over, it wasn't, not yet. The wind's knocked out of me. It's not coming back. Here's where I die, I think. And it's true, I'm possessed by the premonition of what will be, what has to be, my inevitable asphyxiation. At least that's what they see, my boss and crew, as they come running to the back, called there by all that clatter & mess. What they can't see though is the omen seen in a fall, my fall, as I'm doused in black ink, my hands now completely covered, and see the floor is black, and-have you anticipated this or should I be more explicit?-jet on jet; for a blinding instant I have watched my hand vanish, in fact all of me has vanished, one hell of a disappearing act too, the already foreseen dissolution of the self, lost without contrast, slipping into oblivion, until mid-gasp I catch sight of my reflection in the back of the tray, the ghost in the way: seems I'm not gone, not quite. My face has been splattered with purple, as have my arms, granting contrast, and thus defining me, marking me, and at least for a moment, preserving me. Suddenly I can breathe and with each breath the terror rapidly dissipates. My boss , however, is scared shitless. "Jesus Christ Johnny," he says. "Are you okay? What happened?" Can't you see I've shit myself, I think to shout. But now I see that I haven't. Except for the ink blotting my threads, my pants are bone dry. I mumble something about how much my toe hurts. He takes that to mean I'm alright and won't try to sue him from a wheelchair. Later a patron points out the long bloody scratch on the back of my neck. I'm unable to respond. Now though, I realize what I should of said-in the spirit of the dark; in the spirit of the staircase- "Known some call is air am." Which is to say- "I am not what I used to be." ”

—Johnny Truant
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