Amen
I’m rather depressed these days. It’s been years since anything I’ve done has turned out successfully — with a few rare exceptions — and I’m falling into the thing which afflicted you a couple of years ago — a failure of the will, shall we say. My ambitions seem far beyond my talents, and light-years beyond the vicissitudes of my character, and I think of this enormous novel I’m now starting, which could well take ten years, and if done properly, it must be unpublishable except in green-backed French “dirty” editions, and I’ll be middle-aged when it’s done, and somehow I just don’t believe in myself the way I used to, and indeed, worst of all, it doesn’t even seem terribly important. I’m beginning to have the tolerance of the defeated — people I would have despised a few years ago now seem bearable — after all, I say to myself, I haven’t done very well with all the luck I had, and perhaps I do wrong to judge them.
Norman Mailer (via kottke)
I’ll avoid the obvious bemoaning by asking your take on this thing we call “depression.” I question why we’ve firmly fixed “depression” among the constellations of malady. I’m a little torn between two angles:
- Is the great taxonomic engine that is science staking out real afflictions of the mind, helping people understand they don’t suffer alone, that there may be ways to mitigate their pain?
- Alternately, is “depression” shorthand for “I see it, now: this whole enterprise of living is absurd, so I can’t bring myself to care about it”?
As much as I might believe anything, I believe my “mind” is an emergent property of a messy tangle of neurons and its interactions with the rest of my body and environment. No fault in thinking that fixing a mind might start with adjusting its environment, via psychotropics or diet or exercise, etc. However, that presupposes that a particular mindset or behavior is aberrant, that its generative mind is ailing. If in fact a particular conclusion defies widely held ideas, and we diagnose its resultant stress as “disease,” we do so by fiat. None of us knows, none of us subscribes to the Universe’s secret newsletter, You: The Unabridged Story of What You Need and How to Get It.
To put it another way is to resort to cliché: What if the mad are running the asylum; and how can we even know?
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