Paul La Farge Quote
As a Freudian, I'm not supposed to use words like evil; my business is with instinct, memory, and desire. Nevertheless, I've been wondering, lately, whether evil might exist. If it does, I've been thinking, it might be like what Freud called the navel of the dream, the place where all the lines of meaning the analyst has so carefully traced through the patient's life vanish into the unknown. But where the navel of the dream is essentially harmless phenomenon, a point where the dream's meaning is sufficiently understood, and further interpretation would be pointless, evil is a mystery with power. It reaches up into the world and makes everything mysterious.
Paul La Farge
As a Freudian, I'm not supposed to use words like evil; my business is with instinct, memory, and desire. Nevertheless, I've been wondering, lately, whether evil might exist. If it does, I've been thinking, it might be like what Freud called the navel of the dream, the place where all the lines of meaning the analyst has so carefully traced through the patient's life vanish into the unknown. But where the navel of the dream is essentially harmless phenomenon, a point where the dream's meaning is sufficiently understood, and further interpretation would be pointless, evil is a mystery with power. It reaches up into the world and makes everything mysterious.
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About Paul La Farge
Paul Bayard La Farge (November 17, 1970 – January 18, 2023) was an American novelist and essayist. He wrote five novels: The Artist of the Missing (1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), The Facts of Winter (2005), Luminous Airplanes (2011), and The Night Ocean (2017), all of which, particularly Haussmann, earned positive critical attention. His essays, fiction and reviews have appeared in publications such as The Believer, The Village Voice, Harper's, and The New Yorker.