spyked bricks in the wall

brick quote #b

‘Dangerous wellness’, ‘morbid brilliance’, a deceptive euphoria with abysses beneath – this is the trap promised and threatened by excess, whether it be set by Nature, in the form of some intoxicating disorder, or by ourselves, in the form of some excitant addiction. The human dilemmas, in such situations, are of an extraordinary kind: for patients are here faced with disease as seduction, something remote from, and far more equivocal than, the traditional theme of illness as suffering or affliction. And nobody, absolutely nobody, is exempt from such bizarrenesses, such indignities. In disorders of excess there may be a sort of collusion, in which the self is more and more aligned and identified with its sickness, so that finally it seems to lose all independent existence, and be nothing but a product of sickness.

• Oliver Sacks