AustLit

'I’m re-reading The Pillars in a small box-like room in a high-density apartment block in Kensington (Bunurong Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung lands of the Eastern Kulin Nations) while preparing a guest lecture for third-year architecture students. The apartments are structurally sound, but friends have occasionally commented that they resemble a prison, where long corridors eerily absent of residents look onto a large communal courtyard that is never used. Double security gates reinforce our safety as I wonder what developers imagined they were protecting us from.' (Introduction)

'One of the supreme, and indeed painful, ironies of pain is that it is so very hard to communicate, yet it always demands to be given voice. Not only as involuntary cry or anguished moan, but in visceral metaphor, as ‘knife’ or ‘burning’, or in memoir or narrative accounts that seek to ‘flesh out’ this terribly isolating state of being. These attempts at giving language to pain seem to invariably fall short. We may listen to, or read, accounts of pain and feel pained ourselves, but this feeling is mostly the sorrow of realising the other person and their suffering is unreachable, and that the pain cannot be taken away.' (Introduction)