How hard a thing it is to tell about...

-dear_mun: the cost of recollection. Includes another encounter with Enjolras, as well as a run-in with Irma Boissy.
-bakerstreet: been so long, so far forgotten. With Musichetta at the 'I Thought You Were Dead' meme. Meeting for the first time since the barricades rose.
-dear_mun: just shut up. Valjean can't possibly be real, eugh.
-dear_mun: introduction.

"All he had seen was ashes.
(Pause.)
He alone had been spared.
(Pause.)
Forgotten."
— Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“I did not die, did not remain alive.
Think for yourself, if wisdom buds in you,
what I became, deprived of life and death”
— Dante Alighieri, Inferno [trans. Anthony Esolen]

“Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall have forgotten it.”
— Henrik Ibsen, Brand

“Forgetfulness is not just a vis inertia […] but it is rather an active ability to suppress, positive in the strongest sense of the word […] To shut the doors and windows of consciousness for a while; not to be bothered by the noise and battle with which our underworld of serviceable organs work with and against each other; a little peace, a little tabula rasa of consciousness to make room for something new, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for ruling, predicting, predetermining (our organism rules alone oligarchic lines, you see)—that […] is the benefit of active forgetfulness, like a doorkeeper or guardian of mental order, rest, and etiquette.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality [trans. Carol Diethe]

“Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.”
— Haruki Murakami

“I’m in doubt whether I’m myself or no.”
— Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy

"I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing"
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?”
— Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Hell hath no limits nor is circumscribed
In one self place, but where we are is hell.
And where hell is there must we ever be.”
— Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

"How hard a thing it is to tell about,
that wilderness so savage, dense, and harsh,
even to think of it renews my fear.
It is so bitter, death is hardly more."
— Dante Alighieri, Inferno [trans. Anthony Esolen]

“It is an eternal phenomenon: the insatiable will always finds a way to detain its creatures in life and compel them to live on, by means of an illusion spread over things.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [trans. Walter Kaufmann]

“I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name.”
— Bob Dylan, ‘Desolation Row’

"I feel strained, half-stranded."
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"Do
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?"
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land