Detaļas

As far as the dead are concerned, chronology has no import and all that matters are the details, the degree of density, this how and what and everything to do with who.

Going deeper requires a loss of control, requires the abandonment of that constant surveillance of time and space in exchange for a headlong fall inside oneself, or into somebody else, or down one of life’s many cracks and fissures.

She adapted to such a degree that what defined her personality was an absence of personality.

“Getting stuck,” she called it, while I called it “getting attached,” the distance between these two concepts a cornerstone of our conversations, her fear of “getting stuck” and my tendency to “get attached.”

There was no place I’d rather be than in the details next to all this information, all this surface.

“Unhinged”—what does that mean
anyway, other than an ability to drive people crazy, disrupting their worlds?

That’s what a capital city might offer a “fucking unhinged” person in exchange for what she gave us: parties, warmth, chaos, scoldings, a thousand things to irritate us, and the self-knowledge brought by that irritation.

I knew almost nothing about writing, but there was one thing I did know: for me, the process had to be as tightly sealed as the distillate in the cone-shaped vessel on the stove; I knew that every leakage meant death, that the magic disappeared if I looked too closely, that nothing could be divulged before it was done.

Her psychiatric approach to life’s spiritual dimensions, her worship of dirt and shame and the pull she felt from the underworld.

In my world Birgitta Trotzig is the literary counterpart to the blurred picture you can find on a TV screen. It seems like there’s something interesting going on there, but I can’t tell what.