Doris Lessing

This is the sort of thing we accepted as normal. Yet for all of us there were moments when 'the game we were all agreeing to play' simply could not stand up to events: we would be gripped by feelings of unreality, like nausea. Perhaps this feeling, that the ground was dissolving under our feet, was the real enemy...or we believed it to be so. Perhaps our tacit agreement that nothing much, or at least, nothing irrecoverable, was happening, was because for us the enemy was reality, was to allow ourselves to know what was happening. Perhaps our pretences, everyone's pretences, wich in the moments when we felt naked, defenceless, seemed like playacting and absurd, should be regared as admirable? Or perhaps they were necessary, like the games of children who can make playacting a way of keeping reality a long way from their weaknesses?