Pruning an Overgrown Mind

When you reach a certain age, you’re no longer the protagonist of your own actions: all you have left are the consequences of things you’ve already done.  The seeds you’ve sown have been growing away out of sight, and now suddenly they burst up in a kind of jungle that surrounds you on all sides, and you spend your days trying to hack out a path with a machete just so you can breathe.  It soon becomes clear that any hope of getting out is completely false, because the jungle’s spreading faster than we can cut it back and more importantly, because the very idea of ‘getting out’ makes no sense: we can’t get out because at the same time we don’t want to get out, and we don’t want to get out because there’s nowhere else to go, because the jungle is us and getting out would mean a kind of death, or even death itself.  And maybe once we were able to die a certain sort of seemingly harmless death, but now we know such deaths were the seeds we sowed of the jungle we’ve become.

Mario Levero, Empty Words, trans. Annie McDermott, Sheffield: And Other Stories, 2019, 149.