”She [Merry] watched in silence, as still as the monk at the center of the flames, and afterward she would say nothing; even if he spoke to her, questioned her, she just sat transfixed before that set for minutes on end, her gaze focused somewhere else than on the flickering screen, focused inward — inward where the coherence and the certainty were supposed to be, where everything she did not know was initiating a gigantic upheaval, where nothing that registered would ever fade away….

Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Reminds you a little bit of Sally in front of the burning monk on television, right?

• footnote - by Natasha Simons