How the warm rays
of hope and healing enter the dark inner chamber of leaden loneliness through
the unexpected cracks of kindness.
“Sometimes
one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of
illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or
demands,” the poet May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the cure for despair amid a dark season of the spirit.
But what does it take to perch that precarious if in the direction of the light?
When we are in that dark and hollow place, that place of leaden loneliness and
isolation, when “the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the
quality of physical pain,” as William Styron wrote in his classic account of the malady — an indiscriminate malady
that savaged Keats and savaged Nietzsche and savaged Hansberry — what does it take to live through the
horror and the hollowness to the other side, to look back and gasp
disbelievingly, with the poet Jane Kenyon: “What hurt me so terribly… until this moment?”
During a recent
dark season of the spirit, a dear friend buoyed me with the most wonderful,
hope-giving, rehumanizing story: Some years earlier, when a colleague of hers —
another physicist — was going through such a season of his own, she gave him an
amaryllis bulb in a small pot; the effect it had on him was unexpected and
profound, as the effect of uncalculated kindnesses always is — profound and
far-reaching, the way a pebble of kindness ripples out widening circles of
radiance. As the light slowly returned to his life, he decided to teach a class
on the physics of animation. And so it is that one of his students, Emily
Johnstone, came to make Bloom
— a touching
animated short film, drawing from the small personal gesture a universal
metaphor for how we survive our densest private darknesses, consonant with Neil
Gaiman’s insistence that “sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place… to make us warm in
the coldest season.”
Complement with Tim Ferriss on how he survived suicidal depression and Tchaikovsky on depression and finding beauty amid the wreckage of
the soul, then revisit “Having It Out with Melancholy” — Jane Kenyon’s stunning poem about life
with and after depression.
