Haunted -- the echo of Mr. Whittier

and the recorded echo, it echoes. An echo of an echo of an echo. // Echoing, until a voice from far away, from behind the sun, says:

"You're playing to an empty house. // Listen to yourselves--you're so busy telling your stories to each other. You're always turning the past into a story to make yourselves right. -- our culture of blame -- It never changes. People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves. // Some stories, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories... // Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us. It's how we digest our lives. Our experience. You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories the same way this theater seems to digest people. Other events--the ones you can't digest--they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can't talk about, they rot you from the inside out. But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell--you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good."

[Palahniuk, 380-381]


If we can forgive what's been done to us... If we can forgive what we've done to others... If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world. But we still sit here, waiting to be saved. While we're still victims, hoping to be discovered while we suffer. Would it be so bad? To be the last two people in the world? Why can't the world end the same way it started?

[Palahniuk, 383]

Haunted -- the memoirs of Tess Clark

"Mrs. Clark says, Sometimes it seems that we spend the first half of our lives looking for some disaster. And she looks down at her straight-out-chest--a look made almost impossible by her enhanced lips. As young people, she says, we want something to slow us down and keep us trapped in one place long enough to look below the surface of the world. That disaster is a car crash or a war. To make us sit still. It can be getting cancer or getting pregnant. The important part is how it seems to catch us by surprise. That disaster stops us from living the life we'd planned as children--a life of constant dashing around." -- C. Palahniuk, Haunted, 2005: 134