You should say everything that comes into your head.

Freud, 'On Initiating Treatment' (1913)

There are things it's better not to dwell on, things it's normal to forget. The people who are starving or being tortured, the animals that live a life of hell to feed us, the unimaginable extension of the universe, or universes, the impersonality of the statistical laws to which our personal behaviour conforms, oblivion. On the edge of infinite nothingness we go about our trivial business: book holidays, see to the new tax disc for the car, shop for the weekend at Sainsbury's. This is reality, normality, health. Forgetting makes us robust. A whiff of anaesthetic before we start the day does us a world of good. Those who can't forget we call madmen or artists.

LRB 8 January 2004 | PDF Download