Gloom

"And life for its part? Was it perhaps but an infectious disease of matter – just as that which we could call the ultimate origin of matter was perhaps merely a sickness, an irritable proliferation of the immaterial? Here was without doubt the very first step leading to evil, lust and death.... "
-- from The Magic Mountain

I am feeling unusually gloomy these days. A mild, disinterested sadness is my standard operating temperature but these days it is feeling like a major distraction. I don't know where does this contempt for money, power, career, even sex and in short, life itself, come from? Shouldn't have the genes responsible for this been eliminated generations ago according to the Darwinian logic? How could someone so "unfit" for life as me come into this world? Or may be it isn't the genes, it is the environment and the way I was brought up? Though that is obviously not what it is. I had the most normal childhood as it was possible to have. What is then the origin for this disgust for human company? I am wondering all this because I just made up some really wild excuses to decline an invitation to a harmless dinner party this evening just because I felt spending an hour with the chattering classes would push me on the verge of madness!

Anyway, two books that I am in the middle of these days aren't helping matters at all. Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, a winner of National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, is an astonishing work of synthesis and scholarship. He blends together history, philosophy, medicine, science, literature, politics, economics, sociology, personal experiences, basically everything he could find on the subject of human sadness and melancholy and presents them in a lucid though oftentimes in a manner which becomes overwhelming. For example, in his chapter on suicide, he manages to bring in Marx, Durkheim, Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky, all in a single paragraph! One third of this book which is around 700 pages thick is devoted to just notes and bibliography! Fortunately there are no footnotes but only endnotes. Perhaps the most shockingly revealing part of the book is his chapter on Poverty because mental illness is generally thought to be the affliction of the leisure class. He shows why most of the social reform policies will remain ineffective and inadequte until we take the mental health of the homeless and the indigents into account. It is easy to pass judgments on poor people, people on the street, beggars, drug addicts, alcoholics, what is difficult is to understand what really goes on in their minds. What inhuman and devilish odds they are set-up against in their own minds! So far the book has made for an extremely grim reading. The last chapter is called "hope" which I haven't reached yet. May be there is hope after all this?

The other book, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia by French philosopher and feminist critic Julia Kristeva, is a little too dense and often impenetrable, at least for me, tome on melancholy. Kristeva approaches melancholy from the perspective of an abstruse philosophy of language and theoretical psychoanalysis. The gist of the book, as far as I could make out, is that Madness is a discourse and is just another name for "a failure of language" and "a loss of self." It is a state of extreme and radical subjectivity and is actually nothing but an epistemological isolation of one's consciousness. If you have a good background in the philosophy of language and theoretical ideas of Freud and Lacan, this book will prove to be irresistible.