Apparently I still have little use for the subject line
'...I didn't ask you whether you believe that ghosts are seen by people - I asked you whether you believe there are such things as ghosts?'
'No, I most certainly do not!' Raskolnikov exclaimed with more than a touch of aggressiveness.
'I mean, what do people usually say?' Svidrigailov murmured, as though to himself, looking to one side and inclining his head slightly. 'They say: "You're ill, so the things you see are just a non-existent hallucination." But that's woolly thinking, you know. I agree that ghosts are only seen by people who are ill; but I mean, the only proves that ghosts can only be perceived by people who are ill - not that they don't exist.'
'It proves nothing of the kind!' Raskolnikov insisted, irritably.
'Oh? That's your opinion, is it?' Svidrigailov went on, giving him a long, slow look. 'Well, but what if one were to put the argument this way (come along, now, give me a hand): "Ghosts are, so to speak, shreds and fragments of other worlds, their source and origin. Of course, the man who is healthy doesn't need to see them, because the healthy man is the most earthly sort of person, and so is bound, for the sake of gaining an all-round and orderly view of things, to live exclusively the life of this world. Well, but he has only to fall ill, to suffer a disruption of the normal, earthly order of things within his organism, and the possiblity of there being another world begins to exert its influence; the iller he gets, the more numerous are his contacts with the other wolrd, the result being that, when he finally dies, he goes straight there."...'
-'Crime and Punishment' by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (translated by David McDuff)
I'm glad I'm not the only person to whom that had occurred.
Well, I currently ought to be doing something productive, e.g. working on my story, reading, homework, etc. etc...but instead I just feel like sitting here and obsessing for a while.
Today I mostly worked on cutting down a 17 thousand word document into 5 thousand. It's not going very well.