Tower of Pain

Someone I adore at the moment - Marlena de Blasi. I seriously have to buy her books. Read this from A Thousand Days in Venice:

In those solitary evenings by my fire I found finely spun threads, a pattern, my own story. I opened up the kind of memory that feels like a wistful hankering for something lost or for something that never was. I think most of us have it, this potentially destructive habit of mental record keeping that builds, distorts, then breaks up and spreads into the farthest flung territories of reason and consciousness. What we do is accumulate the pain, collect it like cranberry glass. We display it, stack it up into a pile. Then we stack it up into a mountain so we can climb onto it, waiting for, demanding sympathy, salvation. "Hey, do you see this? Do you know how big my pain is?" We look across at other people's piles and measure them, shouting, "My pain is bigger than your pain." It's all somehow like the medieval penchant for tower building. Each family demonstarted its power with the height of its own personal tower. One more layer of stone, one more layer of pain, each one a measure of power."