Joanne Greenberg

He was a man of tempers and now he needed a rage that was cleansing, simple, and direct. But the anger here was so laced with pity, fear, and love that he did not know how he could free himself of it.

There came a great exhaustion and when the doctor said, “Is there anything you want to tell me?” a great gust of anger, so that Deborah stood up quickly and said to her and to Yr and to the Collect and to the Censor, “All right—you’ll ask me questions and I’ll answer them—you’ll clear up my …symptoms’ and send me home … and what will I have then?”

The doctor said quietly, “If you did not really want to give them up, you wouldn’t tell me.” A rope of fear pulled its noose about Deborah. “Come, sit down. You will not have to give up anything until you are ready, and then there will be something to take its place.”

For many years words had come out of her mouth for which her mind could not remember giving the order. Sometimes only a feeling would sweep over her. The feeling would be given voice, but the logic behind it, by which the world might have been convinced, remained mute, and so she lost faith in her own desires. It made her defend them all the more blindly.

If one is to be doomed, one must be beautiful, or the drama is only a comedy. And therefore,

Hobbs was a little brutal sometimes, but it was more than that. He was frightened of the craziness he saw around him because it was an extension of something inside himself. He wanted people to be crazier and more bizarre than they really were so that he could see the line which separated him, his inclinations and random thoughts, and his half-wishes, from the full-bloomed, exploded madness of the patients

“If I can learn these things …” Deborah said, “… can read and learn, why is it still so dark?”

Carla looked at her and smiled a little. “Deb,” she said, “who ever told you that learning facts or theories or languages had anything to do with understanding yourself? You, of all people …”

She now knew that the death she feared might not be a physical one, that it could be a death of the will, the soul, the mind, the laws, and thus not death, but a perpetual dying. The tumor began to ache.

Now that she held this tremulous but growing conviction that she was alive, she began to be in love with the new world.

Outside, the winter air was sharp with cold. Deborah found the world incomparably beautiful. Somewhere beyond the hedge of the Preserve there was smoke rising and she caught the smell of it occasionally. Next to her was a friend and in the craft shop a drawing pad waiting to be filled. She tried to stop the gratitude and hunger that were overflowing inside her, but her eyes filled with the colors and dimensions of the world and the laws of the consubstantial human race—motion and gravity, cause and effect, friendship and a sense of a human self.

Among equals gratitude is reciprocal; her gratitude to these Titans, who called themselves average and were unaware of their own tremendous strength in being able to live, only made her feel more lost, inept, and lonely than ever.