Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Disjunction from the world through suffering leads to excessive interiorization and, paradoxically, to such a high level of consciousness that the world, with all its splendors and glooms, becomes exterior and transcendent. Thus deeply sundered from the world, so irredeemably lonely, how can we forget anything? We want to forget only what made us suffer. However, through some cruel and paradoxical twist, memories vanish when we want to remember but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.

Sartre’s...concept of hell in his 1944 play No Exit is tinglingly prophetic of our current predicament. The play is about three freshly dead strangers who have just arrived in a windowless room in hell. One of the first things they all notice about hell is the absence of mirrors...and they become each other’s looking-glasses. The play’s conception of damnation, then, is a life in which your self-image is forged entirely in public. Your “I” only exists because someone says “You.” Garcin understands that “there’s no need for red-hot pokers” in this place, because both the scrutiny of his roommates and his terrible reliance on them is the torture. “Hell is — other people!”

No Exit [is] a predictive text, a warning to the coming digital generations about living under the unblinking gaze of others. Sartre’s famous line is a recognition that the self–other balance can never be adequately struck as long as the "others" are constantly "watching." Balance depends on our ability to retreat into a truly private place, released from the demands and appellations of our devices.

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We have to entertain the possibility that there is no reason for something existing; or that the split between subject and object is only our name for something equally accidental we call knowledge; or, an even more difficult thought, that while there may be some order to the self and the cosmos, to the microcosm and macrocosm, it is an order that is absolutely indifferent to our existence, and of which we can have only a negative awareness.

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.

As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.

I know only one thing. When I sleep, I know no fear, no, trouble, no bliss. Blessing on him who invented sleep. The common coin that purchases all things, the balance that levels shepherd and king, fool and wise man. There is only one bad thing about sound sleep. They say it closely resembles death.

The pain was the world. The mind could not find a place outside it. He could hear the pain, staticky, in his hand and wrist. He closed his eyes again, briefly. He could feel himself contained in the dark but also just beyond it, on the lighted outer surface, the other side, belonged to both, feeling both, being himself and seeing himself.