Having allowed The Bell Jar to leak into my bones again in all its bleakness, I set myself wondering what it is that separates (mental) wellness from illness.
It differs for each of us, I imagine, but I can at least begin to enumerate the moments when I feel health begin to drain away from me as a consequence of some thought or other which has just been endured.
The night Bluefish underwent her neck operation is a case in point.
I was 12000 miles away from her during her ordeal, and I might as well have been on Neptune, or stuck in the Andromeda Galaxy for all the support I was able to offer.
When that's the reality, anything I can do is the equivalent of pushing chess pieces around a board in order to influence the outcome, one way or another, on a real battlefield. It is the same as printing a few Monopoly notes and then being puzzled when their introduction doesn't fix the economy.
Yet I played online games throughout the night and set myself high-score targets that had to be met if Bluefish was to get out of the hospital alive. Make a double-century in Little Master Cricket within the next hour, else she'll die. Beat three consecutive real-life players on some word game or other, else she'll die.
This is the point where causality ceases to exist, and it is the start of the long, winding path to mental destruction.
I can envisage the day when I shall need to recite the name of every Ottoman sultan before I permit myself to eat dinner; recite every nation in east Europe and its capital city before I drift off to sleep.
Once cause and effect are gone, so is the illusion of humanity, and every day I am more aware of its recession.
