"After the Talking Bird, the nice man at the Tavistok Clinic kept asking me why I stole books and birds, though I had only ever stolen one of each.
I told him it was about meaning, and he suggested, very politely, that it might be a kind of psychosis.
'You think meaning is a psychosis?'
'An obsession with meaning, at the expense of the ordinary shape of life, might be understood as psychosis, yes.'
'I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.'
He twiddled his pencil. His nails were very clean.
'I am only asking questions.'
'So am I.'
He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil: Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it."
Page 195, 'Some Wounds', from 'Lighthousekeeping', Jeanette Winterson
I told him it was about meaning, and he suggested, very politely, that it might be a kind of psychosis.
'You think meaning is a psychosis?'
'An obsession with meaning, at the expense of the ordinary shape of life, might be understood as psychosis, yes.'
'I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.'
He twiddled his pencil. His nails were very clean.
'I am only asking questions.'
'So am I.'
He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil: Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it."
Page 195, 'Some Wounds', from 'Lighthousekeeping', Jeanette Winterson
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