31. Inner darkness

While reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt, I had a string feeling that I know this story from somewhere. And then I remembered Lord of the Flies (William Golding). Aha! This is the one creating my déjà vu moment. 

Lord of the Flies was mandatory reading in school, I don’t remember if high school or university. It is amazing that even though I did not remember all the facts, the emotion of the book was familiar to me, and it came to the surface now, while reading The Secret History.

What is the feeling? What is the feeling connecting these books for me? If we go a step forward, what is the feeling connecting these books and the invisible darkness inside? 

Inside what? Human nature. 

I cannot describe this feeling in one word. I’ll try using a few. 

Consternation, Desperation, Isolation, Numbness, Savageness, Confusion…

While the stories are different, I could notice a few similarities in the story line - a group of young people, living in their artificial, parallel world while studying at the university, (trying to study, they did not learn much), governed in a manipulative way by one of them, convincing the others to do doing things that are not only inhumane, they defy reason. They try to save themselves as well, only to realize that it’s way too late. Of course, I will not tell you the details, I’ll let you discover that. 

What I “heard” while reading and thinking about the story, was about the evil nature of group mentality as in cults. The individuals are getting involved in actions that otherwise would be unthinkable, irrational. As soon as the spell is broken, these people wake up to the reality and have to deal with it. Some of them cannot save themselves and what follows is a life of struggle, addictions and self-descriptive actions. It seems that nothing can exist with that darkness inside, not even a fictional character :), nor can they continue living and feeding it. 

They simply transform, they become something else than humans. Trapped inside a human shell, these creatures have to get out. 

You probably met such people or, maybe, you are one of them. To the former, I would like to say - learn to say no and enforce your boundaries. To the latte -  nature has its way of taking backing into itself everything that comes out of it. You also are part of it. Sooner or later, everything dies.

Nature is wild. Being alive as well.