When penitential grief has wept
O’er some foul dark spot,
One only stream, a stream of blood,
Can wash away the blot.
Lift up Thy bleeding hand, O Lord,
Unseal that cleansing tide;
We have no shelter from our sin
But in Thy wounded side.
(a modern hymn by Cecil Alexander)
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Audible.com is offering a free audiobook with a 14-day trial subscription today only. Could be worthwhile.
It was a nice two days, anyway.
But I couldn’t expect my depression to stay away for much more than that.
What I’m experiencing now isn’t a bottomless, cosmic cold sore, like last week’s depression. But it’s a definite downturn. And that (plus the fact that I’m stuck for other material) gives me an excuse to post a little essay about depression I’ve been thinking out. I justify this in two ways. One, I’m going to make a literary comparison. Two, some of you may be writers who don’t know much about deep depression (or is that an oxymoron?) and I hope to clarify exactly what the experience feels like. For the record.
One of the most notable (and surprising) characteristics of a truly ripe depression is the sense of clarity it seems to give.
Deep depression is like Occam’s Razor, a simple, elegant answer to the whole messy problem.
It’s like the “payoff” in a classic mystery. You know the scene where the detective gathers all the suspects and explains everything, extending an accusing finger at the true culprit (who generally pulls out a hidden gun and forces the detective to dispense quick justice)?
When you’re deeply depressed, you look over your whole life—everything you’ve done and experienced, and you say, “Oh, that explains it. It’s all so simple.” It’s like that moment of clarity one imagines one has just before one dies. Which, the depressee feels, is likely to happen any minute.
So it resembles the payoff in a mystery, as stated above, but the mystery isn’t an English Cozy, or even a Thirties Hard-boiled. It’s a Noir, directed by a Frenchman
I suppose it’s a little like the experience of LSD users. I don’t know about this from experience, but I’m told that musicians (for instance) who performed under the influence of the drug thought they were producing brilliant stuff. And were appalled when they heard recordings once they’d “come down.”
When you’re deeply depressed, all your questions are answered—unpleasantly. “Why am I having trouble at work? Why are my relationships going badly? Why is my health failing?” The answer is simple. “It’s all my own fault. I am a miserable, stupid person whom nobody loves. Not only is my life lousy, but it’s going to get worse and worse until I die. Which will be soon.”
I believe in reason. I’m a strong defender of reason (all praise to Francis Schaeffer). But human beings don’t always recognize reason (or unreason) in their own heads.
That, I think, is one of the things we need other people in our lives to help with.
I’ll go out and find some. Just as soon as I’m a little less depressed.
(Please note that the above, written under the influence of a certain level of depression, may all be complete hogwash.)
How much do you judge a book by its opening lines? I praised P.D. James a while back for her opening lines. It is a wonderful feeling to open a new book with a great sentence or paragraph, but how much does a poor opening sink your hopes for the rest of the book? What do you think of the following openings? Do they pique your interest or leave you flat? (I picked books of similar genre released this year or last.)
1. When the rain isn’t so much falling–be it in bucket loads or like cats and dogs–but rather slamming into the car like an avalanche of stone, you know it’s time to pull over.
When you can’t see much more than the slaphappy wipers splashing through rivers on the windshield, when you’re suddenly not sure if you’re on the road any longer, and your radio emits nothing but static, and you haven’t seen another car since the sky turned black, and your fingers are tense on the wheel in an attempt to steady the old Accord in the face of terrifying wind gusts, you know it’s so totally time to pull over. (source)
2. Starjet Commander Cody Ferguson, six, turned the gears, adjusted the knobs, and jammed the joystick into hyperdrive. Starship Galaxy went into a steep climb, super thrusters whining at top speed.
Back on earth, Daddy looked angry. Mommy cried. The doctor rolled his chair over, put his head close to theirs, and smiled the sour little smile that grown-ups smile when there is nothing in the world to smile about. (source)
3. The guy’s BO made Luke’s eyes water. He had long greasy hair, an eleven o’clock shadow, jeans as brown as they were blue, and a crumpled, stain-riddled Hawaiian shirt.
“This your first time to Agua Rancheria?” He sniffed loudly, wiping his nose.
Luke gave a nod and looked out the bus window, hoping to end the conversation.
No such luck. (source)
4.A dead man spoke to her from the shadows. “Seven o’clock,” his voice rasped, barely audible over the wind tumbling through the dry heat of late summer. “The Mint.”
Even as the wind carried it away, she began telling herself it was an illusion, a ghost speaking to her from the shadows of her own mind rather than the shadows of this pothole-laden street.
Still.
She put down the garbage can and glanced at Steve on the other side of the garbage truck. He was bending down to pick up a couple of clipped branches; if he’d heard the voice, it hadn’t stopped him. (source)
Simon & Schuster, part of the failing CBS empire (I’m sorry. That was a snide, political swipe which was entirely inappropriate in this context. I repent. Truly.) and TurnHere Internet Video have launched bookvideos.tv, another interesting little book promo site using video snippets to raise awareness of their books. Here’s one of a very popular selection, The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Wells.
C. S. Lewis, in the introduction to the 1961 edition of The Screwtape Letters, tells of one subscriber to the Manchester Guardian, which originally published the series, who canceled his subscription because “much of the advice given in these letters seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical.”
Today I got an e-mail from someone who read my latest American Spectator Online article. In the interest of objectivity, I shall quote a portion of his opening paragraph unedited:
You are the most out-of-touch, backwards-thinking, and plain ignorant author I have read on the subject of Islam. Your blatant, and apparently deliberate, disregard for the abhorrent inequalities and lack of human rights inherent to Islam is despicable.
He goes on to castigate me for my defense of Islamic culture.
Now this certainly doesn’t prove…
a) that I’m as good an author as Lewis, or
b) that my correspondent is as dense as the Guardian subscriber.
It’s possible, for instance, that I’m just a bad parodist, and that thousands of readers came away with the very same impression, but weren’t exercised enough to write to me.
And there’s always the possibility that my reader’s letter was itself parody, and that I didn’t get it.
We don’t have annual tomato fights.
I’m in the American Spectator Online again today:
I have very shrewdly tied this column in to my novel, Wolf Time.
Via James Lileks’ new Minneapolis blog, buzz.mn: Don Herbert, better known to my generation as “Mr. Wizard,” has passed away. I hadn’t realized he was a Minnesota native.
I don’t recall that I watched his show a lot. I have an idea I was never sure when it was on, or the station moved it around, or something. But I remember really liking the show when I did see it.
And that wasn’t because of my deep love for science (I possess no such alien commodity). As I remember it, I mostly liked the idea of a smart grownup with a lot of neat toys who never had anything more important to do than explain stuff to kids. There were precious few adults anything like that in my own world.
So now you’re asking, “Well, now that you’re a grownup yourself, are you like that?”
My answer would be to scream and run away at my personal best speed.
Middle-aged, single men are not advised to have anything to do with children if they can help it, in today’s world. This is no great sacrifice in my case, as I really don’t like children much, and can never think of anything to say to them anyway.
Come to think of it, I don’t think we ever saw Mrs. Wizard.
But I’m confident there was one.
Well, I didn’t see today coming.
And I mean that in a good way.
Last night I had one of my insomnia attacks. I lay awake, obsessing between dozes. That’s usually the prelude to a really Huxleyan, semi-comatose work day.
But somehow, when I got up, I felt that today would be different. Taking silent inventory of my thews, sinews and reflexes, I realized I felt pretty good. Somehow I knew that when I got to work I’d catch up on several projects I’d been dogging, and I wouldn’t slip on my diet, and I’d have a good evening walk.
And behold, it came to pass even as I foresaw. All day I felt as if I was looking at things from above, like a grownup, rather than from below, like a helpless kid.
I can think of two explanations.
One is that I’ve been sleeping too much. Maybe God designed me for five hours a night.
The other is that somebody’s been praying for me.
If it’s the second, and you’re the one, thanks.