Girl Interrupted at Her Music, by Vermeer

The girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of lie, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom.

Susanna Kaysen makes this comment on Vermeer’s powerful painting, a piece that most likely played an integral role in her mental illness. In her best-selling novel Girl, Interrupted, she recounted how, at the age of eighteen, she had failed to graduate high school, and found herself housed in a prestigious mental hospital in Massachusetts. She was eventually diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, an illness that I will be writing on in an upcoming post. The entire narrative is profound and moving; a memorable recovery story.

Commentary on The Eden Express II

Why was Mark so attached to the farm? After he had come back, the farm concretely and certainly became his Eden. R.L. Stevenson was right when he said that It is a better thing to travel hopefully than it is to arrive. Mark’s journey had ended and he has arrived? Now what? The only thing to do was to soak in the indescribable beauty and bliss of it all. Everything was absolutely perfect.
But somehow something was not right. The reader can identify a sort of addiction to the farm within Mark. After leaving the farm for a trip into town, Mark experienced grueling stomach problems. He says, “maybe I had become addicted to something in the water or air up there and my stomach troubles when I left were withdrawal symptoms.” Something engraved in Mark’s subconscious made living in Paradise too much for his mind to handle.
His breaking point must have started when he had his first hallucination. One night, a huge face flashed before his eyes. It was all too real to him – the face kept rushing closer and closer, until he was physically inside of the face. “No way to get any perspective on the thing at all, and for all I really knew it was still light-years away and coming and coming and coming.” The face was full of vivid colors, and was very homely to look at. To Mark, “there was nothing at all unreal about that face.” It seemed to him to be some divine experience, some way of reminding him of his own insignificance.
And this is just the beginning of his schizophrenic symptoms. I find it fascinating to read from an inside perspective what insanity feels like.
A post on schizophrenia and more about Mark Vonnegut to come.