Monday Moanin'
Brutal cold. The kind that makes you say "sumbitch" every ten steps, the last punctuated with a shriek and shiver just as you leave the sidewalk and enter the nave. Between my lingering (but only lingering) illness and the repeat waves of cold and/or snow and/or blustery winds, I have to take a look at moving south. I won't, of course. My roots are in Michigan, and I believe in preserving roots. But dang it, those roots are looking more and more expendable as this nasty winter goes on longer and longer.
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Everything is available on the Internet. This guy wrote a micro-review of Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. He starts it with "I finally saw . . .", as if it's been on his To-Do List.
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That's nothin': Australian police declared a state of emergency after a drunken man threatened to blow up half a city with his TV remote control. TV remote controls blow up more than half of American minds every evening.
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Anton LaVey renounces Satan! Well, not quite, but close: Mick Jagger renounces drugs:
"When we were experimenting with drugs, little was known about the effects," Jagger said. "In our time there were no rehab centres like today. Anyway, I did not know about them." Sounding a bit like the 64-year-old grandfather that he is, the fitness fanatic said he couldn't understand how the younger generation, knowing the dangers of drug use, could still be users.
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When recovering from my illness yesterday, I was searching for the perfect reading fit. Spiritual reading was out (one of the worst parts of illness, at least for me, is that it murders any inclination to pray; not out of spite, but just sheer hopelessness and lack of motivation). My political philosophy mainstay De Jouvenel was out. Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest wasn't bad, but I wanted some non-fiction. I eventually struck on old Joseph Epstein essays.
I was richly awarded (as always with good old Joe). In the second paragraph of an essay about Joan Didion and Renata Adler, he asks about depression, the condition that “causes us to dwell on the darkest side of things.” He asks:
What I wanted to know was whether, generally speaking, depression was in effect the common cold of the mind or spirit, something we all lapse into every now and then, usually to emerge not too much the worse for wear; or whether when depressed we are in fact seeing the world in the dark cheerlessness that–given the data: birth, struggle, disease, and death–represents reality perceived in its truest clarity.
That's an excellent question. The Christian brings a different perspective to it, of course: Resurrection, salvation, and eternal hope bring grace and supernatural optimism, but the Christian perspective doesn't answer Epstein's question (when the Christian gets depressed, is his lack of grace merely causing him to see Original Sin in all its real glory?), and even if it did, it's not fair to bring supernatural players into the secular playing field that Epstein set up, even though as a Christian you must bring those players into the game in order to answer it satisfactorily for yourself.
So: Is depression merely a brutal confrontation with reality, which means our non-depressed periods are a soma-world of sorts? Or is depression a mental affliction whose gloomy outlook is fictional? Schopenhauer would take the former position (and for good reason, given his secular outlook). I'm not sure what philosopher would take the latter.
I'm not picking sides. At this point, I'm merely going to note that it takes a good writer and perspective thinker to point out such an important yet fundamental and largely un-addressed question and to phrase it in terms that makes it immediately accessible to anyone.
