But there is no going back, Harry.

[breathedout]

Shame arrives before guilt.

But there is no going back, Harry. The mind is its own place, and it bears us backward and forward. It has its own architecture of the past that comes from real rooms and real streets, but they are made over and over again in time and now reside within, not without. Once those places were filled with the noise of garbage trucks and sirens and the sentence fragments of chattering pedestrians and the odors of the moving seasons, but the dense visions and clamor and smells have been simplified into interior mental codes grown stiff with words. The future is made up of that same stuff–elemental spaces we inhabit with wishes or fears. Why so many fears? There is no single story in that foggy region of childhood to explain you, Harry.

—Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (narrator/journal-keeper Harriet Burden)