Somewhere in me I knew I was mad, I think. When I sat in that room at my aunt's in Korea, talking to the many little cartoons of people floating in my head, there was in me a loneliness that was deeper. The company of psychotic visions is no compensation for a real smile from a real person. Somewhere I understood that it was not right, giving and receiving love from the figments of my imagination — the emptiness of it all I think was not completely lost to me, even in the farthest of my strangest mental wanderings. Somewhere, I believed none of the information presented me, when I thought I was God, or an angel, or a prophet — but alas, this voice was soft and I often missed for the blaring of my insanity. It was no good to be in a quiet place, as my imagination thrived when all was quiet; it was more that I be in the din of the city street or some such loud company that the mad voices needed to compete for my attention, and so occupied, that low song of sanity I could hear the better. It was in the bustle of motion when I knew how alone I truly was.
I think I was not the only one, though. Those of the busy busy striders of life, those who have been caught in the muchness and manyness of life: that, I think, is like a madness, too. Those who have lived in the shouts of myriad activities I believe have had in themselves a quiet voice to which they never listened, that somewhere deep in them have known what is sanity. But these people, like me, have not known to listen for such a soft hint to what life really may mean. Like me, they have acknowledged only the things that shout at our faces — and we have been caught in the cultures of noise, which have drawn us in because they make not the most sense, but the least, and we have strained to hear most what the noise was telling us, not realizing that it was loud because it had nothing to say.
