I want to summarize what I’ve been reading about in the library. hhhhhh how do I do that
I’ve been reading (and have read) a lot about trauma and anxiety, and also literature, literary theory, literary criticism, things like that. I feel like I’m comprehending something vast about human nature and my own nature that makes me want to vibrate at the speed of light.
It’s something to do with picking up a book in the literature section that was a survey of woundedness, or scars and wounds as motifs in classic literature, and picking up a book in the psych section about feeling safe and healing from fear, and realizing the books’ prefaces talked about essentially the same things in essentially the same language
sufficiently advanced psychology, that is, compassionate and human centered, is indistinguishable from literary studies
This book is about coping with real life horror, but it also is just one fantastic insight after another on how to write about horror, probably more so than anything I’ve read actually for the purpose of showing how to write horror.
I literally cannot stop returning to these lines in my head, especially “And only two processes are strong enough to reduce and contain fear. Those two processes are: knowing and loving.”
Does this writer know what a searing artistic insight they have happened upon? That a horror story, a story that delves in fear, must also be a love story, not in the sense of a story about falling in love or that centers the feeling of love, but in the sense that wherever love and understanding is absent, there true horror is, and whatever loves or is loved or must be loved, whatever understands or is understood or demands to be understood, that is what lets us fight back.
Like there are all these thinkpieces on what the core of the horror story is, what is the fundamental human fear that drives it, and I think this is it. It’s right here
