We need something more, perhaps something transcendent and unconfined by  reason to grant some necessary meaning to our lives. That need seems to be something quite fundamentally human, whether or not we are considered mad.

We need to be willing to accept the need for change in the way we see ourselves and the way we behave towards others.

Perhaps especially in this divided and fractured country we need urgently to extend and complicate our lives by engaging with otherness, rather than retreating into familiar territories that can no longer be consoling: the precarious and absurd identities of race and nationality and normality or sanity.

We live in a world increasingly preoccupied with information or data. We attach value to the accumulation of more and more information. We believe that this will grant us greater control over the circumstances of our lives, or enable us to reach beyond ourselves.

Whether we are free from this empirical, objective sense does not detract from the feeling of being free to choose how to act in one way or another, or to choose to act or not to act.