Posted by Jakeman on April 5, 2006, at 20:24:17
In reply to Feeling down............, posted by Kath on April 5, 2006, at 10:24:02
I often turn to poetry or literature when I'm feeling bad. I think it helps me to see that someone else has been through it. This past weekend was like that. I picked up William Styron's book, "Darkness Visible"
He is describing how his depression came upon him.
"By now I had moved back to my house in Connecticut. It was October, and one of the features of this stage of my disorder was the way in which my old farmhouse, my beloved home for thirty years, took on for me at that point when my spirits regularly sank to their nadir, an almost palpable quality of ominousness. The fading eveing light-- akin to that famous "slant of light" of Emily Dickinson's which spoke to her of death, of chill extinction- had none of its familiar autumnal loveliness, but insnared me in a suffocating gloom.
I wondered how this friendly place, teeming with such memories of happiness could almost percepibly seem so hostile and forbidding. As always Rose was present and listening with her unflagging patience to my complaints. But I felt an immense and aching solitude. I could no longer concentrate during those afternoon hours, which for years had been my working time, and the acting of writing itself, became more and difficult and exhausting, stalled, then finally ceased.
There were also dreadful, pouncing seizures of anxiety. One bright day on a walk with my dog I heard a flock of Canada geese honking high above the trees with foliage; ordinally a sight and sound would have exhilarated me. The flight of birds caused me to stop, riveted with fear, aware for the first time that I had been stricken by a serious illnes.
Going home, I couldn't rid my mind of the line of Baudelaire's, dredged up from the distant past... "I have felt the winds of madness."
Styron is the author of Sophie's Choice, The Confessions of Nat Turner and numerous other books and screenplays.
~Jake
poster:Jakeman
thread:629161
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20060331/msgs/629433.html