If any light or hope can be found in this profoundly sad expression of the human predicament, it might be in the way that, as these determined and desperate acts of self-harm arise in some, they as mysteriously pass. I remain nevertheless haunted by the events I have described.

When I came up gasping, my father grabbed me and tossed me back in. When I remember that day, I remember soaring through the air and landing with a splat. I remember myself unattached from everything and yet made of everything. I was the air and the water. I was made of living fragments. I was past, present, and future at once. I felt, more than ever before, and perhaps ever since, deliciously free.

Lying in the warm water, while the light in the room changes, she can often forget herself for a while. Or become herself so completely that everything else ceases, including the hard, long day behind her. But she’s unsettled this evening, something jangled at the heart of it all.

She emerges from the confessional in a state of unease, far worse than when she went in. No penance to ease the burden! She knows she must end the affair but doesn’t think she can, a common human dilemma, not only related to romance. Shouldn’t have gone to the priest, not before she was ready. Who knows what she wanted when she went in there, but certainly not this outcome. Now she’s having a crisis.

We see people who have come through the impossible and have resigned themselves to the necessity of being practical. Survival is living on, living above the wreckage: survivre, supervivencia. You think you know how hard life can get. Then something else happens, something of a kind different to what you ever allowed yourself to expect and you have to revise your whole picture. This doesn’t stop happening, there is no end of surprise. Strangeness arrives again and again, without end. We live on the accumulated ruins of experience. Überleben, sopravvivere.