The Edges of Things

"It was not hard for me to think of nothing, the way I felt at the moment. In order not to think of any one thing, all I had to do was think of many things, a little at a time: just think about something for a moment and fling it into space."
-Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

When I was littler, I used to get these hallucinations when I was trying to fall asleep. In that state before dreams, but after awake would feel like my head was in a vice, like everything about which I thought was infinitely expanding and contracting. It hurt my brain to think about it. I would think about the edges of things, edges so razor-sharp that there was an infinity in their frontier. I couldn't think about it for very long, because it would make me feel like I was going mad. It would make me feel a very real sort of pain and pressure. So I would think about other things. Garfield comics. Doing the dishes. Girls (later on). I was eventually able to make the hallucinations (or whatever they were) go away. But I never felt like I solved the problem. I just felt like I was ignoring it successfully. A minor victory, but I have to wonder if the battle wages on.
Murakami is a good writer; I feel as if the character in this book rationalizes things in a way that I find very comforting. Like, if there are humans out there who think this way, then I'm not alone. It's good to be reminded of that.

latiflearned.com - go and listen.