When middle aged, the magnificent literary critic Harold Bloom plunged into a major depression. He has since written that reading Emerson — especially his Conduct of Life — helped to elevate him back to sanity. I have read and enjoyed The Conduct of Life, but never found it as inspirational or uplifting as Bloom did. (Indeed I find Bloom more inspirational than Emerson.) In pursuit of fleeing my own mental abyss of late, I instead turned to Isaiah Berlin.
This may seem an odd choice. While Emerson (for want of a better phrase) speaks to the soul — that rather dubious superior element of humanity by which we climb to otherwise unattainable heights of self-contentment — Berlin speaks to the intellect, but in ways I find enormously inspirational. His cardinal aim in lectures, essays and books — many of which were conceived during the Cold War — was to ascertain how humanity could live with itself; that is, how the irreconcilabilities between ideologies, nations, cultures, societies and groups could somehow reconcile, or at least get along.
That was an intellectual problem to be solved, and I have reconsidered — re-treated — Berlin's works as a kind of microcosm of the self-contained intellect at work, toward a resolution. By that I mean how could my scrambled, severely depressed mind reconcile its irrational irreconcilabilities? (A regular reader and good friend recently emailed this deeply insightful comment on such irrationality: "I learned about depression when a close friend fell into that hole. I asked her, 'What's wrong — why so unhappy?' And her reply told me what depression is: 'Nothing, that's the whole problem.'")
I have for some time taken an anti-depressant for dysthymia (chronic, low-grade depression), which, when compared to my current clinical depression, is but a bedbug to a tarantula. I will not, however, use a blunderbuss to kill this monstrous pest, as I have done in the past. Such weapons require an agonizing lag in effectiveness, only to then find the side effects … well, depressing. I have decided instead to think — and exercise — my way out of this hellhole, much as Berlin pondered his way through the gruesome Cold War.
"If," wrote Berlin, "like Tolstoy, [some ideologues] sometimes thought that man was not truly free but determined by factors outside his control, they knew well enough, as he did, that if freedom was an illusion it was one without which one could not live or think." Thus it is similarly possible, I reckon, to fool myself (if necessary) into self-contentment, from which comes the indispensable freedom to live and think.
Berlin's free-will speculation comes from one of his collected essays, which draws its title from a 1784 Kantian observation: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made." It seems I was made with a few more crooks, twists and turns than are normal, but I shall never cease trying to straighten myself as best I can.
I can read and think and exercise my way out of this mental sinkhole. In fact, I'm already on my way. Excuse any lapses of logic or poor writing above, for I'm not all the way there yet. Some scrambling has yet to be unscrambled. But I'll get there. Soon. Till then, you take care as well.