I just started listening to the audio-book version of William Gibson’s book The Peripheral.1
Early on in the book, there is a description of one character named Shayleen who is interested in a former marine who is kinda messed up after going through some crazy special-forces type of stuff.
On page 8 of the book there is the following few sentences:
Shaylene had gone out with him a few times in high school, but she’d gotten more interested when he’d come back from the marines, with that chest and the stories around town about Haptic Recon 1. Flynne figured Shaylene was basically doing what the relationship shows called romanticism pathology.
This stuck out to me because, at some point, to some degree or another, we have all romanticized pathology. Right?
Footnotes:
- I’m a longtime reader of Gibson’s work, and I’ll often do a combo read/listen to his books. I’m doing that with this one. I read the first chapter then listened to it (and more) again when I went for a run. ↩