Quotation : Charactorization

Death Kit by Susan Sontag pg2

Diddy, not really alive , Hardly the same. Some people are their lives. Others, like Diddy, merely inhabit their lives. Like insecure tenants, never knowing exactly the extent of their property or when the lease will expire. Like unskilled cartographers drawing and redrawing erroneous maps of an exotic continent .

Eventually , for such a person , everything is bound to run down. The walls sag. Empty spaces budge between objects. The surfaces of object sweat , thin out begin to buckle. The hysterical fluids of fear deposited at the core of objects ooze out along the seams. Deploying things and navigating through space becomes labourous. Too much effort to ample from kitchen to living room, serving drinks, turning on the hi-fi, pretending to be cheerful. But Diddy difficulities cannot be resolved by bigger effort. Stepped-up effort won't repair his ingenious sense of incapacity, which proceeds from a hallucinated erasure of the present as it becomes past.