reeling among split rails
In the thick of work, and it's not pretty. I keep thinking tomorrow's Thursday because I've already crunched through 24 billable hours this week, with research for another project on top of that. Also grouchy from various physical ailments (including a turned ankle) and somewhat shaken by the news that a member of my church is now in hospice care (not someone I know even to speak to, but nevertheless, someone who had been healthy not so long ago, and who's only a few years older than I am, and whose partner I've listened to during finance and stewardship meetings) -- enough that I was in tears earlier tonight after peeking at the end of Nasaw's Andrew Carnegie, with its quotes from his wife's diary during his last days ("...Everybody so kind, but what is life to me now?").
That said, I have an enormous bottle of ginger tea at hand (brewed by a friend as soon as she heard I was back in the land of bronchial woe), and I do like my work -- it steers me toward so many texts I want to revisit properly some(other)day. *rueful grin* One such book, which I picked up from the library last week, is Lincoln's Melancholy. Its author argues that, "because of the trials of his depressions, Lincoln knew what he wanted to live for, but for years he suffered without any clear prospect of how he would achieve it. He continued to plod ahead, even as clarity about why eluded him" (213).
...depressed people are often unable to get out of bed, feeling a kind of paralysis that seems physical and involuntary, even though, on some level, it's known to be mental and volitional. Truly, for those in thrall to mental agony, as Andrew Solomon has observed, merely going to brush one's teeth can feel like a Herculean task. A common argument today has two people standing over the bed. One says, "He can't help it. He has an illness and should be treated with deference." The other disputes this, muttering, "He just needs a swift kick in the butt."
Lincoln's story allows us to see that both points may be true. First, when overcome by mental agony, he allowed himself to be overcome, and for no small time. He let himself sink to the bottom and feel the scrape. Those who say that we must always buck up should see how Lincoln's time of illness proved also to be a time of gestation and growth. Those who say we must always frame mental suffering in terms of illness must see how vital it was that Lincoln roused himself when the time came. How might Lincoln have endangered his future, and his potential, had he denied himself the reality of his suffering? How, too, might he have stagnated had he not realized that life waits for those who choose to live it?
When a depressed person does get out of bed, it's usually not with a sudden insight that life is rich and valuable, but out of some creeping sense of duty or instinct for survival. If collapsing is sometimes vital, so is the brute force of will. To William James we owe the insight that, in the absence of real health, we sometimes must act as if we are healthy. Buoyed by such discipline and habit, we might achieve actual well-being. As Lincoln advised a grumbling general who felt humiliated at having only three thousand men under his command, "Act well your part, there all the honor lies." He who does something at the head of one Regiment, will eclipse him who does nothing at the head of a hundred." Two decades before he wrote these words, after the winter of a great depression, Lincoln understood doing something to be as simple as going to work, or just making preparations for it, which he gamely advised Joshua Speed to do if his "mind were not right." In the small battles of life, brushing one's teeth, taking a walk -- these can be movements in preparation for victory.
That said, I have an enormous bottle of ginger tea at hand (brewed by a friend as soon as she heard I was back in the land of bronchial woe), and I do like my work -- it steers me toward so many texts I want to revisit properly some(other)day. *rueful grin* One such book, which I picked up from the library last week, is Lincoln's Melancholy. Its author argues that, "because of the trials of his depressions, Lincoln knew what he wanted to live for, but for years he suffered without any clear prospect of how he would achieve it. He continued to plod ahead, even as clarity about why eluded him" (213).
...depressed people are often unable to get out of bed, feeling a kind of paralysis that seems physical and involuntary, even though, on some level, it's known to be mental and volitional. Truly, for those in thrall to mental agony, as Andrew Solomon has observed, merely going to brush one's teeth can feel like a Herculean task. A common argument today has two people standing over the bed. One says, "He can't help it. He has an illness and should be treated with deference." The other disputes this, muttering, "He just needs a swift kick in the butt."
Lincoln's story allows us to see that both points may be true. First, when overcome by mental agony, he allowed himself to be overcome, and for no small time. He let himself sink to the bottom and feel the scrape. Those who say that we must always buck up should see how Lincoln's time of illness proved also to be a time of gestation and growth. Those who say we must always frame mental suffering in terms of illness must see how vital it was that Lincoln roused himself when the time came. How might Lincoln have endangered his future, and his potential, had he denied himself the reality of his suffering? How, too, might he have stagnated had he not realized that life waits for those who choose to live it?
When a depressed person does get out of bed, it's usually not with a sudden insight that life is rich and valuable, but out of some creeping sense of duty or instinct for survival. If collapsing is sometimes vital, so is the brute force of will. To William James we owe the insight that, in the absence of real health, we sometimes must act as if we are healthy. Buoyed by such discipline and habit, we might achieve actual well-being. As Lincoln advised a grumbling general who felt humiliated at having only three thousand men under his command, "Act well your part, there all the honor lies." He who does something at the head of one Regiment, will eclipse him who does nothing at the head of a hundred." Two decades before he wrote these words, after the winter of a great depression, Lincoln understood doing something to be as simple as going to work, or just making preparations for it, which he gamely advised Joshua Speed to do if his "mind were not right." In the small battles of life, brushing one's teeth, taking a walk -- these can be movements in preparation for victory.
- - Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 214.