Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  At that time the Lord of the Province of Izumi had a page named Inosuke Murola who was most beautiful and very brave. He was as graceful and delicate as the cherry flower, but his soul was as fearless as the god of war. At first sight you would have taken him for a charming Princess of royal blood. The Lord preferred him to all his other pages. But another page was jealous of the favours shown to Inosuke, and made a completely false and outrageous accusation against him, which he wrote on paper and left in the hall of the palace. The overseer of the palace found the paper and took it to his master, since it was his duty to report even the most insignificant thing to him; and the Lord was furious at his favourite's scandalous behaviour. He was so angry that he dismissed Inosuke from his service, without inquiring whether the accusation were well founded, and banished him from Fushimi without giving him any reason for his disgrace. He ordered his courtiers to keep a Strict watch over him, and not to let him Stir one Step from his house, Inosuke, the victim of false testimony, was confined in a little cottage with his old mother, and was Strictly guarded. The doors were locked, and not even his relatives were allowed to come to see him. His mother and he were completely ignorant of the cause of their disgrace; therefore Inosuke could not commit Hara-kiri, which would otherwise have been the only expedient for a samurai reduced to such a pass. All the servants, anxious for their own interest, abandoned him one after another, fearing to place themselves in the wrong by remaining with a samurai disgraced. Then came times of great hardship for Inosuke and his mother. Grieving for her son's sorrow, she cooked his meals, a thing which she had never done. And her son was pained to see his mother compelled to such base and menial labour. He used to go and fetch water from a well in the garden, and help her in the kitchen. In this miserable manner they dragged on their lives. The days passed, and the months; even the years went by and the Spring seasons returned. Mother and son were astonished by the quick passage of time. Then their means of existence grew scant, and they sold their last possessions. At last they were at the end of their resources.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Fortunately, before my mania could become very public, this colleague—a man whom I had been dating during my separation from my husband, and someone who knew and understood me very well—was willing to take on my manic wrath and delusions. He confronted me with the need to take lithium, which was not a pleasant task for him—I was wildly agitated, paranoid, and physically violent—but it was one he carried out with skill, grace, and understanding. He was very gentle but insistent when he told me that he thought I had manic-depressive illness, and he persuaded me to make an appointment to see a psychiatrist. Together we tracked down everything we could find that had been written about the illness; we read as much as we could absorb and then moved on to what was known about treatment. Lithium had been approved for use in mania only four years earlier, in 1970, by the Food and Drug Administration, and was not yet in widespread use in California. It was clear from reading the medical literature, however, that lithium was the only drug that had any serious chance of working for me. He prescribed lithium and other antipsychotic medications for me, on a very short-term, emergency basis, only long enough to tide me over until I saw my psychiatrist for the first time. He put the correct number of pills out for me to take each morning and evening, and he spent hours talking with my family about my illness and how they might best handle it. He drew blood for several lithium levels and provided encouragement about the prognosis for my recovery. He also insisted that I take a short time off from work, which ultimately saved me from losing my job and my clinical privileges, and arranged for me to be looked after at home during those periods when he was unable to. I felt infinitely worse, more dangerously depressed, during this first manic episode than when in the midst of my worst depressions. In fact, the most dreadful I had ever felt in my entire life—one characterized by chaotic ups and downs—was the first time I was psychotically manic. I had been mildly manic many times before, but these had never been frightening experiences—ecstatic at best, confusing at worst. I had learned to accommodate quite well to them. I had developed mechanisms of self-control, to keep down the peals of singularly inappropriate laughter, and set rigid limits on my irritability. I avoided situations that might otherwise trip or jangle my hypersensitive wiring, and I learned to pretend I was paying attention or following a logical point when my mind was off chasing rabbits in a thousand directions. My work and professional life flowed. But nowhere did this, or my upbringing, or my intellect, or my character, prepare me for insanity.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  subterranean world, through the most nightmarish depths, said Austerlitz, to which no human voice has ever descended. None of the words of the commentary could be distinguished anymore. At the point where, on the original Berlin copy, a male voice, in high-pitched, strenuous tones forced through the larynx, had spoken of task forces and cohorts of workers deployed, as circumstances required, in various different ways, or if necessary retrained, so that everyone willing to work—jeder Arbeitswillige!, so Austerlitz interrupted himself—had an opportunity of fitting seamlessly into the production process, at this point of the tape all that could now be made out, Austerlitz continued, was a menacing growl such as I had heard only once before in my life, on an unseasonably hot May Day many years ago in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris when, after one of the peculiar turns that often came over me in those days, I rested for a while on a park bench beside an aviary not far from the big cats’ house, where the lions and tigers, invisible from my vantage point and, as it struck me at the time, said Austerlitz, driven out of their minds in captivity, raised their hollow roars of lament hour after hour without ceasing. And then, Austerlitz continued, towards the end of the film there was the comparatively long sequence showing the first performance of a piece of music composed in Theresienstadt, Pavel Haas’s study for string orchestra, if I am not mistaken. The series of frames begins with a view into the hall from the back. The windows are

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  The Charnel House [image file=image_rsrcW1.jpg] I reaped a bitter harvest from my own refusal to take lithium on a consistent basis. A floridly psychotic mania was followed, inevitably, by a long and lacerating, black, suicidal depression; it lasted more than a year and a half. From the time I woke up in the morning until the time I went to bed at night, I was unbearably miserable and seemingly incapable of any kind of joy or enthusiasm. Everything—every thought, word, movement—was an effort. Everything that once was sparkling now was flat. I seemed to myself to be dull, boring, inadequate, thick brained, unlit, unresponsive, chill skinned, bloodless, and sparrow drab. I doubted, completely, my ability to do anything well. It seemed as though my mind had slowed down and burned out to the point of being virtually useless. The wretched, convoluted, and pathetically confused mass of gray worked only well enough to torment me with a dreary litany of my inadequacies and shortcomings in character, and to taunt me with the total, the desperate, hopelessness of it all. What is the point in going on like this? I would ask myself. Others would say to me, “It is only temporary, it will pass, you will get over it,” but of course they had no idea how I felt, although they were certain that they did. Over and over and over I would say to myself, If I can’t feel, if I can’t move, if I can’t think, and I can’t care, then what conceivable point is there in living? The morbidity of my mind was astonishing: Death and its kin were constant companions. I saw Death everywhere, and I saw winding sheets and toe tags and body bags in my mind’s eye. Everything was a reminder that everything ended at the charnel house. My memory always took the black line of the mind’s underground system; thoughts would go from one tormented moment of my past to the next. Each stop along the way was worse than the preceding one. And, always, everything was an effort. Washing my hair took hours to do, and it drained me for hours afterward; filling the ice-cube tray was beyond my capacity, and I occasionally slept in the same clothes I had worn during the day because I was too exhausted to undress.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Within psychiatric circles, if you kill yourself, you earn the right to be considered a “successful” suicide. This is a success one can live without. Suicidal depression, I decided in the midst of my indescribably awful, eighteen-month bout of it, is God’s way of keeping manics in their place. It works. Profound melancholia is a day-in, day-out, night-in, night-out, almost arterial level of agony. It is a pitiless, unrelenting pain that affords no window of hope, no alternative to a grim and brackish existence, and no respite from the cold undercurrents of thought and feeling that dominate the horribly restless nights of despair. There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as “successful” and “unsuccessful” to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who “fail” at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right. Suicide, however, is almost always an irrational act and seldom is it accompanied by the kind of rigorous intellect that goes with one’s better days. It is also often impulsive and not necessarily undertaken in the way one originally planned. I, for example, thought I had covered every contingency. I could not stand the pain any longer, could not abide the bone-weary and tiresome person I had become, and felt that I could not continue to be responsible for the turmoil I was inflicting upon my friends and family. In a perverse linking within my mind I thought that, like the pilot whom I had seen kill himself to save the lives of others, I was doing the only fair thing for the people I cared about; it was also the only sensible thing to do for myself. One would put an animal to death for far less suffering. At one point I bought a gun, but, in a transient wave of rational thought, I told my psychiatrist; reluctantly, I got rid of it. Then for many months I went to the eighth floor of the stairwell of the UCLA hospital and, repeatedly, only just resisted throwing myself off the ledge. Suicidal depression does not tend to be a considerate, outward, or other-considering sort of state, but somehow the thought that my family would have to identify the fallen and fractured me made that ultimately not an acceptable method. So I decided upon a solution that seemed to me to be poetic in its full-circledness. Lithium, although it ultimately saved my life, at that particular time was causing me no end of grief and sorrow. So I decided to take a massive overdose.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Yet reading and writing, he added, had always been his favorite occupation. How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper. But now I found writing such hard going that it often took me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort, and written it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy of all the words I had employed. If at times some kind of self-deception nonetheless made me feel that I had done a good day’s work, then as soon as I glanced at the page next morning I was sure to find the most appalling mistakes, inconsistencies, and lapses staring at me from the paper. However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again. Soon I could not even venture on the first step. Like a tightrope walker who has forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other, all I felt was the swaying of the precarious structure on which I stood, stricken with terror at the realization that the ends of the balancing pole gleaming far out on the edges of my field of vision were no longer my guiding lights, as before, but malignant enticements to me to cast myself into the depths. Now and then a train of thought did succeed in emerging with wonderful clarity inside my head, but I knew even as it formed that I was in no position to record it, for as soon as I so much as picked up my pencil the

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  By the time I got to the last tape my eyes were swollen from crying and my throat raw from screaming. During the very last scene, Keita was kneeling in front of the camera, waiting for God knew who. A tall cat with piss-yellow skin came into frame, totally naked. Keita proceeded to lick up and down the shaft of his dick, while running her nails across his ass cheeks. His back arched in ecstasy as she sucked him like a peppermint stick. Dude grabbed her by the wig she was wearing and began fucking her mouth like a jackhammer. She began jerking his dick while she licked under his balls and made her way around to his ass. I wanted to throw up again, but I didn’t have anything left in my stomach! As if the knife hadn’t been driven in deep enough, the dude’s face came into frame and what little bit of breath I had left in my body escaped me. It was my man Reggie. So, Keita was the freak-ass stripper that he had been spending so much of his time and money with. I sat there and watched helplessly as my man fucked my girl in every single hole. When he was done, he came all over her face and proceeded to wipe what was left onto her waiting lips. I was a man defeated. For all the running around on Keita I did, it never occurred to me that she might be doing the same. Not my love-goddess. Never in a million years. I thought I knew all the tricks, but apparently she knew one that I didn’t. Keita had put one over on the infamous Chocolate. Seeing my woman fucking all those guys on tape took something out of me. The fire that had only hours prior burned within me was gone. I no longer had the strength or desire to live. I crawled—yes, crawled—to where my gym bag lay and retrieved my gun. The iron felt cool yet comforting in my hands. I placed the barrel in my mouth and prepared to leave this cruel world behind, until I heard the sound of the front door opening. “Baby, are you here?” she called up. “Dante, why are all the lights off? Are you being nasty?” Hearing her voice enraged me. Here I was about to check out over a no-good, low-life bitch. The more she talked, the madder I got. At one point I felt like I had completely taken leave of my senses, and for the kind of shit I was thinking about, I guess I had. Suddenly, a plan began to form in my mind.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  any valuables such as pictures or antiques, and I remember, said Vera, how she once showed me a passage in one of those proclamations issued by the occupying power stating that in the case of any contravention of this regulation, both the Jew concerned in the transaction and the person acquiring the property must expect the most severe of measures to be taken by the State Police. The Jew concerned in the transaction! Agata had cried, adding: Really, the way these people write! It’s enough to make your head swim. I think it was in the late autumn of 1941, said Vera, that Agata had to take her wireless, her gramophone and the records she loved so much, her binoculars and opera glasses, musical instruments, jewelry, furs, and the clothes Maximilian had left behind to the so- called Compulsory Collection Center. Because of some mistake she had made in complying with this order, she was sent to shovel snow on Ruzyné airfield on a freezing day—winter came very early that year, said Vera—and at three o’clock the next morning, in the deepest part of the night, the two envoys of the Israelite religious community whom she had been expecting for some time arrived with the news that Agata must prepare to be taken away within six days. These messengers, as Vera described them to me, said Austerlitz, who were strikingly alike and had faces that seemed somehow indistinct, with flickering outlines, wore jackets furnished with assorted pleats, pockets, button facings, and a belt, garments which looked especially versatile although it was not clear what purpose they served. The pair spoke quietly to Agata for some time, and gave her a sheaf of printed forms and instructions setting out everything down to the very smallest detail: where and when the person summoned must present herself, what items of clothing were to be brought—coat, raincoat, warm headgear, earmuffs, mittens, nightdress, underclothes, and so on—what articles of personal use it was advisable to bring, for instance sewing things, leather grease, a spirit stove, and candles; the weight of the main item of luggage, which was not to exceed fifty kilos; what else could be brought in the way of hand baggage and provisions; how the luggage was to be labeled, with name, destination, and the number allotted to her; the proviso that all the attached forms were to be filled in and signed, that it was not permitted to bring cushions or other articles of furnishing, or to make rucksacks and traveling bags out of Persian rugs, winter coats, or other valuable remnants of fabric; and furthermore that matches, lighters, and smoking were prohibited at the embarkation point and thereafter in general, and all orders issued by the official authorities were to be followed to the letter in every contingency. Agata was unable, as I could see for myself, said Vera, to follow these nauseatingly phrased directives; instead, she simply flung a few wholly impractical items into a bag at random, like someone going away for the weekend, so that finally, difficult as it was for me and guilty as it made me

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  And Peter, in his first Epistle, which may be assigned to the same year, immediately after the outbreak of the persecution, and shortly before his death, warns the Christians in Asia Minor of a fiery trial which is to try them, and of sufferings already endured or to be endured, not for any crime, but for the name of "Christians."530 The name "Babylon"531 for Rome is most easily explained by the time and circumstances of composition. Christianity, which had just reached the age of its founder, seemed annihilated in Rome. With Peter and Paul the first generation of Christians was buried. Darkness must have overshadowed the trembling disciples, and a despondency seized them almost as deep as on the evening of the crucifixion, thirty-four years before. But the morning of the resurrection was not far distant, and the very spot of the martyrdom of St. Peter was to become the site of the greatest church in Christendom and the palatial residence of his reputed successors.532 The Apocalypse on the Neronian Persecution. None of the leading apostles remained to record the horrible massacre, except John. He may have heard of it in Ephesus, or he may have accompanied Peter to Rome and escaped a fearful death in the Neronian gardens, if we are to credit the ancient tradition of his miraculous preservation from being burnt alive with his fellow-Christians in that hellish illumination on the Vatican hill.533 At all events he was himself a victim of persecution for the name of Jesus, and depicted its horrors, as an exile on the lonely island of Patmos in the vision of the Apocalypse. This mysterious book—whether written between 68 and 69, or under Domitian in 95—was undoubtedly intended for the church of that age as well as for future ages, and must have been sufficiently adapted to the actual condition and surroundings of its first readers to give them substantial aid and comfort in their fiery trials. Owing to the nearness of events alluded to, they must have understood it even better, for practical purposes, than readers of later generations. John looks, indeed, forward to the final consummation, but he sees the end in the beginning. He takes his standpoint on the historic foundation of the old Roman empire in which he lived, as the visions of the prophets of Israel took their departure from the kingdom of David or the age of the Babylonian captivity.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  This classical autobiography, which every theological student should read, is of universal application, and in it every Christian may bewail his own wanderings, despair of himself, throw himself unconditionally into the arms of God, and lay hold upon unmerited grace.1787 Augustine had in his own life passed through all the earlier stages of the history of the church, and had overcome in theory and in practice the heresy of Manichaeism, before its opposite, Pelagianism, appeared. By his theological refutation of this latter heresy, and by his clear development of the Biblical anthropology, he has won the noblest and most lasting renown. As in the events recorded in his Confessions he gives views of the evangelical doctrines of sin and of grace, so in the doctrines of his anti-Pelagian writings he sets forth his personal experience. He teaches nothing which he has not felt. In him the philosopher and the living Christian are everywhere fused. His loftiest metaphysical speculation passes unconsciously into adoration. The living aroma of personal experience imparts to his views a double interest, and an irresistible attraction for all earnest minds.1788 Yet his system was not always precisely the same; it became perfect only through personal conflict and practical tests. Many of his earlier views—e.g., respecting the freedom of choice, and respecting faith as a work of man—he himself abandoned in his Retractations;1789 and hence he is by no means to be taken as an infallible guide. He holds, moreover, the evangelical doctrines of sin and grace not in the Protestant sense, but, like his faithful disciples, the Jansenists, in connection with the sacramental and strict churchly system of Catholicism; he taught the necessity of baptismal regeneration and the damnation of all unbaptized children, and identified justification in substance with sanctification, though he made sanctification throughout a work of free grace, and not of human merit. It remains the exclusive prerogative of the inspired apostles to stand above the circumstances of their time, and never, in combating one error, to fall into its opposite. Nevertheless, Augustine is the brightest star in the constellation of the church fathers, and diffuses his light through the darkest periods of the middle ages, and among Catholics and Protestants alike, even to this day.1790 His anthropology may be exhibited under the three stages of the religious development of mankind, the status integritatis, the status corruptionis, and the status redemtionis. I. The Primitive State of man, or the State of Innocence. Augustine’s conception of paradise is vastly higher than the Pelagian, and involves a far deeper fall and a far more glorious manifestation of redeeming grace. The first state of man resembles the state of the blessed in heaven, though it differs from that final state as the undeveloped germ from the perfect fruit. According to Augustine man came from the hand of his Maker, his genuine masterpiece, without the slightest fault. He possessed freedom, to do good; reason, to know God; and the grace of God.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I’d like to be rich, even if it were only for a week, and then go to a hospital with a good disease, a fatal one, and have flowers in the room and nurses dancing around and telegrams coming. They take good care of you if you’re rich. They wash you with cotton batting and they comb your hair for you. Shit, I know all that. Maybe I’d be lucky and not die at all. Maybe I’d be a cripple all my life… maybe I’d be paralyzed and have to sit in a wheelchair. But then I’d be taken care of just the same… even if I had no more money. If you’re an invalid—a real one—they don’t let you starve. And you get a clean bed to lie in… and they change the towels every day. This way nobody gives a fuck about you, especially if you have a job. They think a man should be happy if he’s got a job. What would you rather do—be a cripple all your life, or have a job… or marry a rich cunt? You’d rather marry a rich cunt, I can see that. You only think about food. But supposing you married her and then you couldn’t get a hard on any more—that happens sometimes—what would you do then? You’d be at her mercy. You’d have to eat out of her hand, like a little poodle dog. You’d like that, would you? Or maybe you don’t think of those things? I think of everything . I think of the suits I’d pick out and the places I’d like to go to, but I also think of the other thing. That’s the important thing. What good are the fancy ties and the fine suits if you can’t get a hard on any more? You couldn’t even betray her—because she’d be on your heels all the time. No, the best thing would be to marry her and then get a disease right away. Only not syphilis. Cholera, let’s say, or yellow fever. So that if a miracle did happen and your life was spared you’d be a cripple for the rest of your days. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about fucking her any more, and you wouldn’t have to worry about the rent either. She’d probably buy you a fine wheelchair with rubber tires and all sorts of levers and what not. You might even be able to use your hands—I mean enough to be able to write. Or you could have a secretary, for that matter. That’s it—that’s the best solution for a writer. What does a guy want with his arms and legs? He doesn’t need arms and legs to write with. He needs security… peace… protection. All those heroes who parade in wheelchairs—it’s too bad they’re not writers.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  When the lights went out and the characters faded away flat, dead as words, then it was quite magnificent, the façade; in every crevice of the old gnarled front there was the hollow chant of the nightwind and over the lacy rubble of cold stiff vestments there was a cloudy absinthe-like drool of fog and frost. Here, where the church stood, everything seemed turned hind side front. The church itself must have been twisted off its base by centuries of progress in the rain and snow. It lay in the Place Edgar-Quinet, squat against the wind, like a dead mule. Through the Rue de la Monnaie the wind rushed like white hair streaming wild: it whirled around the white hitching posts which obstructed the free passage of omnibuses and twenty-mule teams. Swinging through this exit in the early morning hours I sometimes stumbled upon Monsieur Renaud who, wrapped in his cowl like a gluttonous monk, made overtures to me in the language of the sixteenth century. Falling in step with Monsieur Renaud, the moon busting through the greasy sky like a punctured balloon, I fell immediately into the realm of the transcendental. M. Renaud had a precise speech, dry as apricots, with a heavy Brandenburger base. Used to come at me full tilt from Goethe or Fichte, with deep base notes that rumbled in the windy corners of the Place like claps of last year’s thunder. Men of Yucatan, men of Zanzibar, men of Tierra del Fuego, save me from this glaucous hog rind! The North piles up about me, the glacial fjords, the blue-tipped spines, the crazy lights, the obscene Christian chant that spread like an avalanche from Etna to the Aegean. Everything frozen tight as scum, the mind locked and rimed with frost, and through the melancholy bales of chitter-wit the choking gargle of louse-eaten saints. White I am and wrapped in wool, swaddled, fettered, hamstrung, but in this I have no part. White to the bone, but with a cold alkali base, with saffron-tipped fingers. White, aye, but no brother of learning, no Catholic heart. White and ruthless, as the men before me who sailed out of the Elbe. I look to the sea, to the sky, to what is unintelligible and distantly near. The snow under foot scurries before the wind, blows, tickles, stings, lisps away, whirls aloft, showers, splinters, sprays down. No sun, no roar of surf, no breaker’s surge. The cold north wind pointed with barbed shafts, icy, malevolent, greedy, blighting, paralyzing. The streets turn away on their crooked elbows; they break from the hurried sight, the stern glance. They hobble away down the drifting lattice work, wheeling the church hind side front, mowing down the statues, flattening the monuments, uprooting the trees, stiffening the grass, sucking the fragrance out of the earth. Leaves dull as cement: leaves no dew can bring to glisten again. No moon will ever silver their listless plight.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  When she bites herself, as it were, to test the sharpness of her teeth. In those days, when I first knew her, she was saturated with Strindberg. That wild carnival of maggots which he reveled in, that eternal duel of the sexes, that spiderish ferocity which had endeared him to the sodden oafs of the northland, it was that which had brought us together. We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I could not recognize the world. When I found myself loose the music had ceased; the carnival was over and I had been picked clean. ... After leaving the Pension Orfila that afternoon I went to the library and there, after bathing in the Ganges and pondering over the signs of the zodiac, I began to reflect on the meaning of that inferno which Strindberg had so mercilessly depicted. And, as I ruminated, it began to grow clear to me, the mystery of his pilgrimage, the flight which the poet makes over the face of the earth and then, as if he had been ordained to re-enact a lost drama, the heroic descent to the very bowels of the earth, the dark and fearsome sojourn in the belly of the whale, the bloody struggle to liberate himself, to emerge clean of the past, a bright, gory sun god cast up on an alien shore. It was no mystery to me any longer why he and others (Dante, Rabelais, Van Gogh, etc., etc.) had made their pilgrimage to Paris. I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair. One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent faces are the visages of one’s keepers. Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing., The air is chill and stagnant, the language apocalyptic. Not an exit sign anywhere; no issue save death. A blind alley at the end of which is a scaffold. An eternal city, Paris!

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  At the time, nothing seemed to be working, despite excellent medical care, and I simply wanted to die and be done with it. I resolved to kill myself. I was cold-bloodedly determined not to give any indication of my plans or the state of my mind; I was successful. The only note made by my psychiatrist on the day before I attempted suicide was: Severely depressed. Very quiet. In a rage I pulled the bathroom lamp off the wall and felt the violence go through me but not yet out of me. “For Christ’s sake,” he said, rushing in—and then stopping very quietly. Jesus, I must be crazy, I can see it in his eyes: a dreadful mix of concern, terror, irritation, resignation, and why me, Lord? “Are you hurt?” he asks. Turning my head with its fast-scanning eyes I see in the mirror blood running down my arms, collecting into the tight ribbing of my beautiful, erotic negligee, only an hour ago used in passion of an altogether different and wonderful kind. “I can’t help it. I can’t help it,” I chant to myself, but I can’t say it; the words won’t come out, and the thoughts are going by far too fast. I bang my head over and over against the door. God make it stop, I can’t stand it, I know I’m insane again. He really cares, I think, but within ten minutes he too is screaming, and his eyes have a wild look from contagious madness, from the lightning adrenaline between the two of us. “I can’t leave you like this,” but I say a few truly awful things and then go for his throat in a more literal way, and he does leave me, provoked beyond endurance and unable to see the devastation and despair inside. I can’t convey it and he can’t see it; there’s nothing to be done. I can’t think, I can’t calm this murderous cauldron, my grand ideas of an hour ago seem absurd and pathetic, my life is in ruins and—worse still—ruinous; my body is uninhabitable. It is raging and weeping and full of destruction and wild energy gone amok. In the mirror I see a creature I don’t know but must live and share my mind with. I understand why Jekyll killed himself before Hyde had taken over completely. I took a massive overdose of lithium with no regrets.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Part Two [image file=image_rsrcW2.jpg] A NOT SO FINE MADNESSFlights of the Mind [image file=image_rsrcW1.jpg] There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?”

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  His job was gone and his money had all run out. In a month or so they were to be married. Meanwhile the parents were supplying the dough. “Once they’ve got me properly in their clutches,” he said, “I’ll be nothing but a slave to them. The father thinks he’s going to open up a stationery store for me. Ginette will handle the customers, take in the money, etc., while I sit in the back of the store and write—or something. Can you picture me sitting in the back of a stationery store for the rest of my life? Ginette thinks it’s an excellent idea. She likes to handle money. I’d rather go back to the château than submit to such a scheme.” For the time being, of course, he was pretending that everything was hunky-dory. I tried to persuade him to go back to America but he wouldn’t hear of that. He said he wasn’t going to be driven out of France by a lot of ignorant peasants. He had an idea that he would slip out of sight for a while and then take up quarters in some outlying section of the city where he’d not be likely to stumble upon her. But we soon decided that that was impossible: you can’t hide away in France as you can in America. “You could go to Belgium for a while,” I suggested. “But what’ll I do for money?” he said promptly. “You can’t get a job in these goddamned countries.” “Why don’t you marry her and get a divorce, then?” I asked. “And meanwhile she’ll be dropping a kid. Who’s going to take care of the kid, eh?” “How do you know she’s going to have a kid?” I said, determined now that the moment had come to spill the beans. “How do I know?” he said. He didn’t quite seem to know what I was insinuating. I gave him an inkling of what Yvette had said. He listened to me in complete bewilderment. Finally he interrupted me. “It’s no use going on with that,” he said. “I know she’s going to have a kid, all right. I’ve felt it kicking around inside. Yvette’s a dirty little slut. You see, I didn’t want to tell you, but up until the time I went to the hospital I was shelling out for Yvette too. Then when the crash came I couldn’t do any more for her. I figured out that I had done enough for the both of them. … I made up my mind to look after myself first. That made Yvette sore. She told Ginette that she was going to get even with me. … No, I wish it were true, what she said. Then I could get out of this thing more easily. Now I’m in a trap. I’ve promised to marry her and I’ll have to go through with it. After that I don’t know what’ll happen to me.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Shit, I know all that. Maybe I’d be lucky and not die at all. Maybe I’d be a cripple all my life... maybe I’d be paralyzed and have to sit in a wheelchair. But then I’d be taken care of just the same... even if I had no more money. If you’re an invalid—a real one—they don’t let you starve. And you get a clean bed to lie in... and they change the towels every day. This way nobody gives a fuck about you, especially if you have a job. They think a man should be happy if he’s got a job. What would you rather do—be a cripple all your life, or have a job... or marry a rich cunt? You’d rather marry a rich cunt, I can see that. You only think about food. But supposing you married her and then you couldn’t get a hard on any more—that happens sometimes—what would you do then? You’d be at her mercy. You’d have to eat out of her hand, like a little poodle dog. You’d like that, would you? Or maybe you don’t think of those things? I think of everything. I think of the suits I’d pick out and the places I’d like to go to, but I also think of the other thing. That’s the important thing. What good are the fancy ties and the fine suits if you can’t get a hard on any more? You couldn’t even betray her—because she’d be on your heels all the time. No, the best thing would be to marry her and then get a disease right away. Only not syphilis. Cholera, let’s say, or yellow fever. So that if a miracle did happen and your life was spared you’d be a cripple for the rest of your days. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about fucking her any more, and you wouldn’t have to worry about the rent either. She’d probably buy you a fine wheelchair with rubber tires and all sorts of levers and what not. You might even be able to use your hands—I mean enough to be able to write. Or you could have a secretary, for that matter. That’s it—that’s the best solution for a writer. What does a guy want with his arms and legs? He doesn’t need arms and legs to write with. He needs security... peace... protection. All those heroes who parade in wheelchairs—it’s too bad they’re not writers. If you could only be sure, when you go to war, that you’d have only your legs blown off... if you could be sure of that I’d say let’s have a war tomorrow. I wouldn’t give a fuck about the medals—they could keep the medals. All I’d want is a good wheelchair and three meals a day. Then I’d give them something to read, those pricks.” The following day, at one-thirty, I call on Van Norden. It’s his day off, or rather his night off.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Each time Carl wilts a little more. “But that’s impossible!” he finally blurts out. “No it ain’t!” croaks Marlowe. “You’re gonna lose your job... I got it straight.” Carl looks at me in despair. “Is he shitting me, that bastard?” he murmurs in my ear. And then aloud—“What am I going to do now? I’ll never find another job. It took me a year to land this one.” This, apparently, is all that Marlowe has been waiting to hear. At last he has found someone worse off than himself. “They be hard times!” he croaks, and his bony skull glows with a cold, electric fire. Leaving the Dôme Marlowe explains between hiccups that he’s got to return to San Francisco. He seems genuinely touched now by Carl’s helplessness. He proposes that Carl and I take over the review during his absence. “I can trust you, Carl,” he says. And then suddenly he gets an attack, a real one this time. He almost collapses in the gutter. We haul him to a bistro at the Boulevard Edgar- Quinet and sit him down. This time he’s really got It—a blinding headache that makes him squeal and grunt and rock himself to and fro like a dumb brute that’s been struck by a sledge hammer. We spill a couple of Fernet-Brancas down his throat, lay him out on the bench and cover his eyes with his muffler. He lies there groaning. In a little while we hear him snoring. “What about his proposition?” says Carl. “Should we take it up? He says he’ll give me a thousand francs when he comes back. I know he won’t, but what about it?” He looks at Marlowe sprawled out on the bench, lifts the muffler from his eyes, and puts it back again. Suddenly a mischievous grin lights up his face. “Listen, Joe,” he says, beckoning me to move closer, “we’ll take him up on it. We’ll take his lousy review over and we’ll fuck him good and proper.” “What do you mean by that?” “Why we’ll throw out all the other contributors and we’ll fill it with our own shit—that’s what!” “Yeah, but what kind of shit?” “Any kind... he won’t be able to do anything about it. We’ll fuck him good and proper. One good number and after that the magazine’ll be finished. Are you game, Joe?” Grinning and chuckling we lift Marlowe to his feet and haul him to Carl’s room. When we turn on the lights there’s a woman in the bed waiting for Carl. “I forgot all about her,” says Carl. We turn the cunt loose and shove Marlowe into bed. In a minute or so there’s a knock at the door. It’s Van Norden. He’s all aflutter. Lost a plate of false teeth—at the Bal Nègre, he thinks. Anyway, we get to bed, the four of us. Marlowe stinks like a smoked fish. In the morning Marlowe and Van Norden leave to search for the false teeth.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Stumbling down the Rue Mouffetard, with these reflections stirring in my brain, I recalled another strange item out of the past, out of that guidebook whose leaves she had asked me to turn but which, because the covers were so heavy, I then found impossible to pry open. For no reason at all—because at the moment my thoughts were occupied with Salavin in whose sacred precincts I was now meandering—for no reason at all, I say, there came to mind the recollection of a day when, inspired by the plaque which I passed day in and day out, I impulsively entered the Pension Orfila and asked to see the room Strindberg had occupied. Up to that time nothing very terrible had befallen me, though I had already lost all my worldly possessions and had known what it was to walk the streets in hunger and in fear of the police. Up to then I had not found a single friend in Paris, a circumstance which was not so much depressing as bewildering, for wherever I have roamed in this world the easiest thing for me to discover has been a friend. But in reality, nothing very terrible had happened to me yet. One can live without friends, as one can live without love, or even without money, that supposed sine qua non. One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. I had time and sentiment enough to spare to peep into other people’s lives, to dally with the dead stuff of romance which, however morbid it may be, when it is wrapped between the covers of a book, seems deliciously remote and anonymous. As I was leaving the place I was conscious of an ironic smile hovering over my lips, as though I were saying to myself “Not yet, the Pension Orfila!” Since then, of course, I have learned what every madman in Paris discovers sooner or later; that there are no ready-made infernos for the tormented. It seems to me I understand a little better now why she took such huge delight in reading Strindberg. I can see her looking up from her book after reading a delicious passage, and, with tears of laughter in her eyes, saying to me: “You’re just as mad as he was... you want to be punished!” What a delight that must be to the sadist when she discovers her own proper masochist!

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Life would be so nice once they had the stationery store. He wouldn’t have to do a stroke of work. She would do everything. He could stay in back of the store and write—or whatever he wanted to do. It went on like this, back and forth, a seesaw, for a few weeks or so. I was avoiding them as much as possible, sick of the affair and disgusted with the both of them. Then one fine summer’s day, just as I was passing the Credit Lyonnais, who comes marching down the steps but Fillmore. I greeted him warmly, feeling rather guilty because I had dodged him for so long. I asked him, with more than ordinary curiosity, how things were going. He answered me rather vaguely and with a note of despair in his voice. “I’ve just gotten permission to go to the bank,” he said, in a peculiar, broken, abject sort of way. “I’ve got about half an hour, no more. She keeps tabs on me.” And he grasped my arm as if to hurry me away from the spot. We were walking down toward the Rue de Rivoli. It was a beautiful day, warm, clear, sunny—one of those days when Paris is at its best. A mild pleasant breeze blowing, just enough to take that stagnant odor out of your nostrils. Fillmore was without a hat. Outwardly he looked the picture of health—like the average American tourist who slouches along with money jingling in his pockets. “I don’t know what to do any more,” he said quietly. “You’ve got to do something for me. I’m helpless. I can’t get a grip on myself. If I could only get away from her for a little while perhaps I’d come round all right. But she won’t let me out of her sight. I just got permission to run to the bank—I had to draw some money. I’ll walk around with you a bit and then I must hurry back—she’ll have lunch waiting for me.” I listened to him quietly, thinking to myself that he certainly did need someone to pull him out of the hole he was in. He had completely caved in, there wasn’t a speck of courage left in him. He was just like a child—like a child who is beaten every day and doesn’t know any more how to behave, except to cower and cringe. As we turned under the colonnade of the Rue de Rivoli he burst into a long diatribe against France. He was fed up with the French. “I used to rave about them,” he said, “but that was all literature. I know them now. … I know what they’re really like. They’re cruel and mercenary. At first it seems wonderful, because you have a feeling of being free. After a while it palls on you. Underneath it’s all dead; there’s no feeling, no sympathy, no friendship. They’re selfish to the core. The most selfish people on earth!