Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Stories

have evolved the theory that the driver peruses his newspaper and reluctantly refolds it and replaces it in the hutch on green to signal the paralyzed dislike he feels about his paid job and a court-appointed psychologist might diagnose the newspaper as a cry for help.

I read a news story concerning a young woman of only seventeen, who had killed herself three weeks into lockdown, because she “couldn’t go out and see her friends.” She was not a nurse, with inadequate PPE and a long commute, arriving at a ward of terrified people, bracing herself for a long day of death. But her suffering, like all suffering, was

Where the horrors of actual human suffering fell short, his own imagination provided the more-extreme elements, transforming the merely shocking into the truly appalling. No depth had he not plumbed. From no horror had he averted his eyes.

Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us27 spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at lea