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At last, what poets had been saying for centuries was scientific fact. Rejection really does hurt. We can have a broken bone or a broken heart. We can feel the pain of a stomach ache or of heartache. We can be hurt by a dog's bite or by a biting remark...

From the outside, Looking In
Despite a dream life in a farmhouse in the French countryside, Isabel Huggan is still searching for her place in an alien land.
Time passes unevenly from place to place, has different weight and value. Here, it seems to have collapsed, folding in and compressing itself into something deep and dense, a richer, thicker brew than I, a child of the New World, have been accustomed to. The air I breathe as I walk by the Ourne is full of old souls, the noise of the water falling over the dam is like the sound of distant voices. Layer upon layer of lives come and gone.
In some ways I exist at a level beneath language, where words do not touch me, but at the same time I am forever trying to "catch on", to know and be known. I am not myself, at the same time as I am more myself than ever, for there is also constant clear definition...
A line floats into my head, so perfectly appropriate that it makes me laugh aloud: "If you can't be with the one you love, then love the one you're with." Easier said than done, of course. I know all about homesickness - sipping maple syrup from a spoon while listening to a cassette tape of loon calls, endlessly writing letters to friends asking for news, sifting through old photographs, weeping on the telephone. I've been there, that strange and dangerous place where longing can blind you to everything else. And so you learn to live with mal de pays as with a chronic illness or disability, you salt your days with nostalgie. Then finally you wake up and compare yourself to the millions of displaced people in the world who will never see their homes again, and you feel ashamed, and you stop.
The ghosts of the silkworms are as silent as they were in life, and you sleep without interruption, except for the hourly tolling of the bell at the mairie coming clear and sweet across the fields. It always rings the hour twice, as if to ensure that its message is heard: Listen, it says. Pay attention. This is where you are.
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An exile in Darkness and Light
There's method in our sadness
Social rejection can be so painful that it sometimes leads to violence. But, researchers are finding ways to recover from ostracism, including social snacking.
· We often try to hurry others through the healing of social pain

An insightful feature can be digested by indulging in the latest edition of the SMH Good Weekend: 20 March 2004, p 18 about Billy Connolly. While there are many abondoned, abused and now rich as @*#%, there is only one Jozef Imrich ... Snippets:
Alcohol kept his mood and aggression levels elevated. I did not mind a good punch-up at all. I used to delight in being the world's only violent hippie....
For five decades, he has had a persistent nightmare, like Jozef, about drowning. What normally happens is he discovers he can breathe under water.

The whole thing reminds me of a great story by Spencer Holst (in his collection The Language of Cats, out of print), where a beautiful girl chats up a lonely old guy during a costume party, and he completely falls for her, and the story ends with her whispering to him, It's midnight, take off your mask. Of course, he wasn't wearing one.
· Ouch............. [ via Observant Gianna ]