The girl was not specifically religious; [...] yet although her faith was nameless her way of living was somehow an affirmation of life rather than a… - R. D. Laing

If the blind must lead the blind, it is as well
that the leader knows he is.

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.

...to forgo one's autonomy becomes the means of secretly safeguarding it; to play possum, to feign death, becomes a means of preserving one's aliveness. To turn oneself into a stone becomes a way of not being turned into a stone by someone else. 'Be thou hard,' exhorts Nietzsche. In a sense that Nietzsche did not, I believe, himself intend, to be stony hard and thus far dead forestalls the danger of being turned into a dead thing by another person. Thoroughly to understand oneself (engulf oneself) is a defense against the risk involved in being sucked into the whirlpool of another person's way to comprehending oneself. To consume oneself by one's own love prevents the possibility of being consumed by another.