To feel. To trust the feeling. I long for that - Ingmar Bergman

...we have something in common: our love for the boy Carl. We love him, it's as simple as that. When I became his stepmother, he was 26, but still a child... a highly neglected child... badly treated by his friends and his older brothers. Kind and industrious, terribly cleanly and anxiously pedantic. The great difficulty was that he was afflicted with attacks of rage. He once actually broke my nose. I care for this careless old child. I want to give him a little security. When he realises his grand project has gone the way of the world...

I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don't have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn't play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn't watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you're forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you're genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don't speak, why you don't move, why you've created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you've left your other parts one by one.

One of ennui's most terribel components is the overwhelming feeling of ennui that comes over you whenever you try to explain it.