I thought there’s something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn’t seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn’t really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
Further, Dr. Gold said with a straight face, the pill at optimum dosage could have the side effect of impotence. Until that moment, although I’d had some trouble with his personality, I had not thought him totally lacking in perspicacity; now I was not all sure. Putting myself in Dr. Gold’s shoes, I wondered if he seriously thought that this juiceless and ravaged semi-invalid with the shuffle and the ancient wheeze woke up each morning from his Halcion sleep eager for carnal fun.
I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering.
Maybe that’s the key to happiness – being sort of dumb, not wanting to know any of the answers.
It is evil to keep these people in bondage, yet they cannot be freed. They must be educated! To free these people without education and with the prejudice that presently exists against them would be a ghastly crime.
Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are, for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuality. It may require on the part of friends, lovers, family, admirers, an almost religious devotion to persuade the sufferers of life’s worth, which is so often in conflict with a sense of their own worthlessness, but such devotion has prevented countless suicides.
The most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction.
Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression – in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.
In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come – not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute.
I suddenly encountered the face of loneliness, and decided that it was a merciless and ugly face indeed.
Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being.
You live several lives while reading.
I don’t see any point in trying to equate one evil with another, or to assign some stupid scale of values. They’re both awful! Would.
That I chose Independence Day as the moment to strike was of course a piece of deliberate irony.
And so you see, dear reader, the death of my friend Sophie forced me to realize that the whole universe is one big concentration camp run by God – the biggest Nazi of them all! So slavery in Virginia wasn’t all that bad. And it was really God’s fault anyway. Pretty good tragic insight there. Think I’ll crank some Bellamy Brothers and get loaded!
But my behavior was really the result of the illness, which had progressed far enough to produce some of its most famous and sinister hallmarks: confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memory.
The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come – not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow.
Oh, Daddy, I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve tried to grow up – to be a good little girl, as you would say, but everywhere I turn I seem to walk deeper and deeper into some terrible despair. What’s wrong, Daddy? What’s wrong? Why is happiness such a precious thing? What have we done with our lives so that everywhere we turn – no matter how hard we try not to – we cause other people sorrow?
Oh, I would say, you’ve never understood me, Harry, that not out of vengeance have I accomplished all my sins but because something has always been close to dying in my soul, and I’ve sinned only in order to lie down in darkness and find, somewhere in the net of dreams, a new father, a new home.