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“Accept yourself as you are,” he said. “Stop trying to dig in to your motives. You have set yourself a moral standard that nobody could live up to. Your early religious training …” Ah dear, she thought, how they all deplore my early religious training. “For God’s sake,” her husband said, “give up worrying about your imaginary sins and try to behave decently. You use your wonderful scruples as an excuse for acting like a bitch. Instead of telling yourself that you oughtn’t to have married me, you might concentrate on being a good wife.” “But I do try,” she said sadly. “I really do.” “Oh, Jesus,” he said, “you overdo it or you underdo it. One day you’re a miracle of a woman and the next morning you’re a hell-cat. Why do we have to live like that? Why can’t you be like anybody else?”
i mean i get it
[...] She could no longer go back into circulation, as she had done so often before. The little apartment in the Village, the cocktail parties, the search for a job, the loneliness, the harum-scarum, Bohemian habits, all this was now unthinkable for her. She had lost the life-giving illusion, the sense of the clean slate, the I-will-start-all-over-and-this-time-it-is-going-to-be-different. Up to the day that Frederick had sent her to the doctor, she had believed herself indestructible. Now she regarded herself as a brittle piece of porcelain. Between the two of them, they had taught her the fine art of self-pity. “Take it easy,” “Don’t try to do too much,” “You are only human, you know,” “Have a drink or an aspirin, lie down, you are overstrained.” In other words, you are a poor, unfortunate girl who was badly treated in her childhood, and the world owes you something. And there is the corollary: you must not venture outside this comfortable hospital room we have arranged for you, see how homey it is, the striped curtains, the gay bedspread, the easy chair with the reading lamp, why, you would hardly know it was a hospital—BUT (the threat lay in the conjunction), don’t try to get up, you are not strong enough; if you managed to evade the floor nurses, you would be sure to collapse in the street.
noooo
If one only could … But it required strength. It took it out of one so. The romantic life had been too hard for her. In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak. The small state, racked by internal dissension, invites the foreign conqueror. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility. The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance. Frederick imagined that she had married him for security (this was one of the troubles between them), but what he did not understand was that security from the telephone company or the grocer was as nothing compared to the other security he gave her, the security from being perpetually in the wrong, and that she would have eaten bread and water, if necessary, in order to be kept in jail.
To know God and yet do evil, this was the very essence of the romantic life, a kind of electrolytical process in which the cathode and the anode act and react upon each other to ionize the soul. And, as they said, it could not go on. If you cannot stop doing evil, you must try to forget about God. If your eyes are bigger than your stomach, by all means put one of them out. Learn to measure your capacities, never undertake more than you can do, then no one will know that you are a failure, you will not even know it yourself. If you cannot love, stop attempting it, for in each attempt you will only reveal your poverty, and every bed you have ever slept in will commemorate a battle lost. The betrayer is always the debtor; at best, he can only work out in remorse his deficit of love, until remorse itself becomes love’s humble, shamefaced proxy. The two she had cared for most (or was it that they had cared most for her?) had, she believed, understood all this during those last hours when the packed trunks stood about the room and the last pound of butter got soft in the defrosting icebox (it seemed a pity to waste it, but what were you going to do?). They had consoled her and petted her and promised that she would be happy, that she would soon forget them—just as if they had been leaving her, instead of the other way around. The most curious thing about it was that their wounds, whose seriousness perhaps she had exaggerated, had been readily healed by time, while her own, being self-inflicted, continued to pain her. There are other girls in the world, but there is only the single self.
ahh!!!