Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination, velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
Interpretation
The quote contrasts the concepts of viscosity and velocity to express the complexity of human experience and perception.
Susanna Kaysen highlights the dualities present in human behavior, illustrating how silence and stillness can arise from either a lack of inner activity (viscosity) or from deep engagement and fascination (velocity). This suggests that outward appearances may not always reflect the true nature of one's internal state, emphasizing the complexity of human emotions and perceptions.
In practice
In a psychology lecture discussing emotional responses, one might include this quote to illustrate the complexity of inner experiences.
Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60's. Or maybe I was just a girl... interrupted.
I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.
Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.
I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it, even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself. I was demonstrating externally and irrefutably an inward condition.
Don't separate the mind from the body. Don't separate even character - you can't. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously. Disease is one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.
Surrender is not something that you can do. If you do it, it is not surrender, because the doer is there. Surrender is a great understanding that, "I am not." Surrender is an insight that the ego exists not, that, "I am not separate." Surrender is not an act but an understanding.
We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.
The Convention thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.
Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.
Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.
The true conservative is the man who has a real concern for injustices and takes thought against the day of reckoning.
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