“Faced with the prospect of a black depression, Highsmith once again retreated into fantasy, dreaming about an affair with the actress Anne Meacham, whose picture she had seen in a magazine publicising her role in the Tennessee Williams' play, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. After the disasters of recent years, she reckoned that the safest option was to escape into romantic imagination. She reviewed her failures over the past five years and concluded that 'the moral is: stay alone. Any idea of any close relationship should be imaginary, like any story I am writing. This way no harm is done to me or to any other person'.” WritingDreamRomanceBlackImaginationFictionFantasyRelationshipFailureDepressionRomanticSafetyAffairHarmDisasterStoryImaginaryRetreatDreamingWriteEscapeFailuresPictureActressDisastersMagazineSafestRetreated Book:Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι Source: Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι
“If [Patricia Highsmith] saw an acquaintance walking down the sidewalk she would deliberately cross over so as to avoid them. When she came in contact with people, she realised she split herself into many different, false, identities, but, because she loathed lying and deceit, she chose to absent herself completely rather than go through such a charade. Highsmith interpreted this characteristic as an example of 'the eternal hypocrisy in me', rather her mental shape-shifting had its source in her quite extraordinary ability to empathise. Her imaginative capacity to subsume her own identity, while taking on the qualities of those around her - her negative capability, if you like - was so powerful that she said she often felt like her inner visions were far more real than the outside world. She aligned herself with the mad and the miserable, 'the insane man who feels himself one with all mankind, all life, because in losing his mind, he has lost his ego, his self-ness', yet realised that such a state inspired her fiction. Her ambition, she said, was to write about the underlying sickness of this 'daedal planet' and capture the essence of the human condition: eternal disappointment.” PeopleLifeMindLyingImaginationFictionVisionMankindIdentityEgoAmbitionEmpathyHumanMadDisappointmentContactInsaneMiserableHypocrisySicknessDeceitAutismAvoidanceVisionsLoathePlanetAvoidOutsideSplitIdentitiesCharadeEmpathiseSelf NessSubsume Book:Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι Source: Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι
“The world that spun from the web of her imagination was manifestly more real to [Patricia Highsmith] than what she saw before her. It was as if, like her fiction, she inhabited a paraxial region, and area which, like one of the working titles for Strangers on a Train, could be said to lie at 'The Other Side of the Mirror'.” WorldRealRealityImaginationFictionMirrorSpunWebInhabitParaxial Book:Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι Source: Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι
“After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.” HeartArtSelfGovernmentSpiritualIndividualBeliefFearFictionAuthorityMurderGuiltEmptinessPessimismAutismAbyssAlienationPessimistSystemRetributionExploreKafkaMaterialHollownessTerrifyingGog Book:Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι Source: Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι