Beyond Romance

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I had been wandering around the apartment for hours, avoiding the desk. Couldn't think, couldn't write. My head filling up with fog, mist, cotton wool, dry ice; the fog rolling in through the window tops. The usual. The daily experience. The condition I struggle with from nine in the morning on, fighting to occupy a small clear space in my head until two or three in the afternoon when I desert the effort, feeling empty and defeated and as if I haven't heard the sound of a human voice in a thousand years.

That afternoon I had an appointment uptown, at an address three miles from my house, and on impulse I decided to walk. When I hit the street it was as though I'd emerged from a cave into the light. Everything I saw--shops, lights, cars, people--looked interesting to me. I took a deep breath and felt my lungs swell. Then I ran into someone I hadn't seen in years. The exhilaration of the unexpected encounter! My stride lengthened. I got where I was going, did what I'd gone to do, and decided to walk back. When I got home I saw that the bad feeling had washed out of me. The walk had purged me.

I realized then how ordinary my depression was. Ordinary and predictable, ordinary and daily. Daily depression, that's all it was. I saw, as though for the first time, that daily depression eats energy. Without energy inner life evaporates; without inner life there is no animation; without animation there is no work. A life in thrall to daily depression is doomed to mediocrity.

In the same moment I saw that this was loneliness, the thing itself. Loneliness was the evaporation of inner life. Loneliness was me cut off from myself. Loneliness was the thing nothing out there could cure.

The depression was, I knew, rooted in a grievance that was old, older than love, older than marriage, older than friendship or politics. The grievance was my dear friend, my close friend. I have given up many others over the years, but not this one, never this one. This one, I saw, had been given the run of the house.

I knew enough to know that I would not hold on to what I was now seeing: that something in me would refuse to absorb the information. I would forget. I would not take it in. I would be overwhelmed again. Insight alone could not save me. I'd have to clear out each day anew. Walking had purged me, washed me clean, but only for that day. I understood the dailiness of the task. I was condemned to walk.

More important, I was condemned to live with what I could not take in.

We all are. Those of us who live alone; treading water; waiting for a pardon; clinging to the most educated discontent in history.

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