That Point of Self-Devouring

 

 

 

"Missed Opportunity"

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There is a beautiful article in The Paris Review about Philip Seymour Hoffman, addiction, isolation, and loneliness. Go here to read it.. (it's long - but it's really really good - and dead-on-balls accurate about so many things..).  An excerpt: "In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion;” Albert Camus, in his essay “The Minotaur,” tells us, “in order to serve men better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength?” Where does one find that solitude except perhaps at the center of the labyrinth of the self? But what if, there at the center, what we find is not the solution to the maze? What if there we discover at last that we’re just our own separate, grotesque Minotaurs: half person—a person we recognize as ourselves—and half anger, an anger we want to deny, an anger about being trapped, alone, an anger made to feel shame for feeling so alone. Maybe, in some ways, that is what happened to Hoffman: in his descent into loneliness, in order to know it and to be able to express on the cinema screen its warp and woof, he lost the thread that could have led him back out, and that hunger, that need for connection, devoured him wholly. Addiction and loneliness meet at that point of self-devouring." Boom...

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