Equus

Reading Equus by Peter Shaffer. One of the strangest, most horrifying and beautiful stories I've ever encountered. It also deals with what I believe is arguably one of the most important themes that can ever be the subject of a book, film, poem, conversation, or thought: the way in which our common conception of 'normalcy' does away with our ability to feel passion.

" I wish there was one person in my life I could show. One instinctive, absolutely unbrisk person I could take to Greece, and stand in front of certain shrines and sacred streams and say 'Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local Gods. And not just the old dead ones with names like Zeus - no, but living Geniuses of Place and Person! And not just Greece but modern England! Spirits of certain trees, certain curves of brick wall, and slate roofs - just as of certain frowns in people and slouches'...I'd say to them - 'Worship as many as you can see - and more will appear!'...If I had a son, I get you he'd come out exactly like his mother. Utterly worshipless. Would you like a drink?"


Thoughts of worship, for most people, bring automatic associations with God, Christian God, institutionalized religion. The privilege of being so emotionally affected by what can be at times absolutely rendering wonders of natural beauty and strangeness and even the horrifying - is worship. The sensitivity of the artist and the aesthete. To feel that capacity within in us to stand in awe and reverence at even the seeming subtleties - to exist in that world - one of seeing and feeling the spirits of trees, of something inside of you being moved by the lilt of a note in a piece of music or a voice, breathing in the smell of the after-rain air at night, marveling at the curve of a jawline. I can only live there. I cannot live anywhere else.

"The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal."