“Power” — and “Sickness”
“it was called power. When I felt it, it was called sickness.” Simon speaks aloud the central formula of the whole book: one and the same feeling — the inability to let go, the tracking, the jealousy, the need to be the only one in another’s world — is called power in the strong and sickness in the weak. Jacob’s obsession passed for character. The same obsession in Simon was diagnosed as perversion — including by himself.
There is precise social truth in this observation: language really does hand out diagnoses by rank — even if Simon draws the equal sign wider than a clinician would. A captain’s aggression is “leadership”, a victim’s silence is “weirdness”; the king’s wish to own is normal, the outcast’s wish to belong is shame. Until feelings get their true names back, both carriers remain untreated — which is exactly what this story demonstrates.
