The D word
So, where were we? I remember promising an update on what's been happening with me these last few months some time in early January. I got distracted. OK, no. I crawled back inside my head. Inward. Coward. I've been doing it so long, it's an ingrained habit now, difficult to shake.
There's a desire to see even in the worst of times something good, to rationalize one's failure to act as a wise and prudent decision. I've been sliding into a torpor like the proverbial frog in a slowly heating cauldron; I'd never noticed that the suck I had been feeling had not only changed in quantity, but also in quality, that it was ruling my life to an unprecedented degree. Some people stuck their heads in to yell at me to get out, some even reached in and were scalded; but I kicked my feet and insisted I was just having one of my prolonged baths and would come out only when I've had enough. A greater egotist and rationalizer than I has done the job of justifying the labour of withdrawal; I excerpt it below, with a few key words changed to better fit my condition. I tend to agree: inaction and surrender to Kismet can be a kind of ultimate anodyne, pain-killer, self-induced coma. But it brings with its rewards the dangers also inherent in opiates: habit-forming dependency; a mental constipation.
Anyway, it's late. I will continue the confessional tomorrow. Hopefully will finish, too, before I drive every eye away!
Freedom from resentment, enlightenment about resentment--who knows how much I am ultimately indebted, in this respect also, to my protracted depression! The problem is far from simple: one must have experienced it from strength as well as from weakness. If anything at all must be adduced against being laid low and being weak, it is that one's really remedial instinct, one's fighting instinct [Wehr- und Waffen-Instinkt] wears out. One cannot get rid of anything, get over anything, repel anything--everything hurts. People and things obtrude too closely; experiences strike too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound. Depression itself is a kind of resentment.
Against all this the invalid has only one great remedy--I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without revolt which is exemplified by a Russian soldier who, finding the war too strenuous, finally lies down in the snow. No longer to accept anything at all, take anything, take anything in--to cease reäcting altogether.
The great intelligence of this fatalism is not always merely the courage to die; it can also preserve life under the most perilous conditions by reducing the metabolism, slowing it down, as a kind of will to hibernate. Carrying this logic a few steps further, we arrive at the fakir who sleeps for weeks in a grave.
Because one would use oneself up too quickly if one reacted in any way, one no longer reacts at all: this is the logic. And nothing burns one up faster than the affects of resentment. Anger, pathological vulnerability, impotent lust for revenge, thirst for revenge, poison-mixing in any sense-- no reaction could be more disadvantageous for the exhausted [...]. Resentment is what is forbidden par excellence for the sick--it is their specific evil--unfortunately also their most natural inclination. [...]
I displayed the "Russian fatalism" I mentioned by tenaciously clinging for years to all but intolerable situations, places, apartments, and society, merely because they happened to be given by accident: it was better than changing them, than feeling that they could be changed--than rebelling against them. Any attempt to disturb me in this fatalism, to awaken me by force, used to annoy me mortally--and was in fact mortally dangerous every time. Accepting one's Fate [ein Fatum], not wishing oneself "different"--that is in such cases great reason itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: Why I Am So Wise (1:6), adapted from a translation by Walter Kaufmann.
There's a desire to see even in the worst of times something good, to rationalize one's failure to act as a wise and prudent decision. I've been sliding into a torpor like the proverbial frog in a slowly heating cauldron; I'd never noticed that the suck I had been feeling had not only changed in quantity, but also in quality, that it was ruling my life to an unprecedented degree. Some people stuck their heads in to yell at me to get out, some even reached in and were scalded; but I kicked my feet and insisted I was just having one of my prolonged baths and would come out only when I've had enough. A greater egotist and rationalizer than I has done the job of justifying the labour of withdrawal; I excerpt it below, with a few key words changed to better fit my condition. I tend to agree: inaction and surrender to Kismet can be a kind of ultimate anodyne, pain-killer, self-induced coma. But it brings with its rewards the dangers also inherent in opiates: habit-forming dependency; a mental constipation.
Anyway, it's late. I will continue the confessional tomorrow. Hopefully will finish, too, before I drive every eye away!
Freedom from resentment, enlightenment about resentment--who knows how much I am ultimately indebted, in this respect also, to my protracted depression! The problem is far from simple: one must have experienced it from strength as well as from weakness. If anything at all must be adduced against being laid low and being weak, it is that one's really remedial instinct, one's fighting instinct [Wehr- und Waffen-Instinkt] wears out. One cannot get rid of anything, get over anything, repel anything--everything hurts. People and things obtrude too closely; experiences strike too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound. Depression itself is a kind of resentment.
Against all this the invalid has only one great remedy--I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without revolt which is exemplified by a Russian soldier who, finding the war too strenuous, finally lies down in the snow. No longer to accept anything at all, take anything, take anything in--to cease reäcting altogether.
The great intelligence of this fatalism is not always merely the courage to die; it can also preserve life under the most perilous conditions by reducing the metabolism, slowing it down, as a kind of will to hibernate. Carrying this logic a few steps further, we arrive at the fakir who sleeps for weeks in a grave.
Because one would use oneself up too quickly if one reacted in any way, one no longer reacts at all: this is the logic. And nothing burns one up faster than the affects of resentment. Anger, pathological vulnerability, impotent lust for revenge, thirst for revenge, poison-mixing in any sense-- no reaction could be more disadvantageous for the exhausted [...]. Resentment is what is forbidden par excellence for the sick--it is their specific evil--unfortunately also their most natural inclination. [...]
I displayed the "Russian fatalism" I mentioned by tenaciously clinging for years to all but intolerable situations, places, apartments, and society, merely because they happened to be given by accident: it was better than changing them, than feeling that they could be changed--than rebelling against them. Any attempt to disturb me in this fatalism, to awaken me by force, used to annoy me mortally--and was in fact mortally dangerous every time. Accepting one's Fate [ein Fatum], not wishing oneself "different"--that is in such cases great reason itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: Why I Am So Wise (1:6), adapted from a translation by Walter Kaufmann.