好文共享: An excerpt from What Doesn‘t Kill Us Makes Us

P117

In the Oresteia, Orestes avenges the death of his father, Agamemnon, by killing his mother, Clytemnestra. Following the matricide, a trio of ancient goddesses known as the Furies plunge down on Orestes and torment him mercilessly. The goddesses appear to Orestes as sneering, scowling old women in tattered black robes, their heads topped by snarls of snapping vipers. While pursuing Orestes they sing a ghoulish, incantatory song intended to achieve their all-consuming purpose: driving him into permanent madness.

The concept of demons has been around for thousands of years, predating all three Abrahamic religions and the serpents and satanic adversaries found in them. Ancient Egyptians regarded demons as malevolent spirits that wandered the earth and sowed suffering in defiance of more benevolent deities; a millennium later, Christ traveled the Judean countryside casting them out of possessed “demoniacs.” But what the Furies meant to the ancient Greeks may actually come closes to what demons represent to us today—the insidious feelings that haunt us for our transgressions, the malevolent shadows of the past acts that led us into dark corners from which we never fully returned. These are the demons formed from our festering guilt, shame, and remorse, the unburied knowledge of our own grave erring. They bubble up from that material within us that is repressed or expediently forsaken, embodiments of our need for internal cohesion.

But demons have come to signify even more than just the weight of unrepented sin. What was once seen as a sinister force hailing from the spiritual realm is now invoked to illuminate various afflictions we understand as either psychological or otherwise rooted in the brain, reflecting a larger cultural shift in how we explain pain and suffering. Today we conjure demons to refer to everything from addictions and psychiatric disorders to traumatic experiences and ongoing struggles to break ties with parts of our past. When an addict relapses, when malevolent voices resume whispering in a man’s head, or when a woman is abruptly pulled into revisiting the horrific abuse from her past, we might colloquially remark that they are each struggling “against their demons.” What connects all these distinct incarnations is the notion that there are parts of ourselves that we’ve lost control of—thoughts, memories, and compulsions that have splintered away from the agency and self-preservation that govern the rest of our minds, taking refuge in the distant hills and valleys of our psyche. Lurking there, the living experience of when our brains went haywire, our demons are always biding their time for a chance to claw their way into the present, hauling the refuse we thought we’d banished for good.

Individuals leading afterlives grapple with a related but separate phenomenon; to wit, they have their own order of demons. Life altering catastrophes create a narrative rupture that our minds do not easily absorb and move on from. In the aftermath, we’re compelled to search for the sense of continuity and coherence that was destroyed, scouring for some way to reclaim an identity and story that vanished with the jarring abruptness of an evacuated city. We’re haunted by the personae—parent, student, athlete, extrovert, paramour—that were permanently comprised, if not lapped into oblivion. The demons in afterlives are not uncontrollable dimension of our selves, that is, but rather unreachable ones—the people we once were and the lives they led. The insuperable conflict at the heart of many afterlives is between the competing impulses to resurrect that person and turn our back on them forever.

这里的afterlife是指遭遇重大不幸的人生，有before and after之区别。

很多人的心中或许多多少少都住在一个魔鬼：）