...This truth is that life, far from being the beach which our
modern age promises, is in fact, a very serious thing indeed, and if faced up to realistically is, to quote C.S. Lewis, quite simply ‘unbearable’. Sadly, few people do now face up to it realistically, preferring instead to live in a permanent Disneyland where such things as Big Brother, the National Lottery and the plethora of characters who star in the nation's favourite soap opera, ‘The News’, assume a greater importance and reality than their own lives and those of their family, friends and community. So wedded now is our culture to humanistic ideology, with its emphasis on Positive Thinking, Progress and Optimism, that anyone who does face up to real life and, as a result, suffers emotionally, is judged as being ‘disturbed’ and in need of ‘help’.
1. C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
But the late Erich Fromm, an eminent German psychiatrist,
believed that in actual fact the opposite is true, and that it is
usually the people whom society calls disturbed or 'neurotic' who are the ones most humanly alive and sane. For, he said, though the ‘neurotic’ increasingly experiences a sense of despair and anguish, there is always hope for him, because he is reacting as a healthy person should react, whereas conversely, those whom society considers 'normal' are the really hopeless victims.
‘Many of them are normal’, said Fromm, ‘because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence [and] their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not...struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.’
As a person whom ‘normal’ people have long deemed to be
‘neurotic’ and in need of ‘treatment’ I have compiled this
anthology in an attempt to defend my deeply-held belief that low spirits, sadness, melancholy and depression are not usually symptoms of a disease from which we need to be ‘cured’ but are in actual fact often the correct and rational responses of thinking human beings to life in a fallen world.
Another reason why I have compiled the anthology is that I
believe there is much purpose served in reading about the distress of others. As Charlotte Bronte wrote, ‘If we ourselves live in fullness of content, it is well to be reminded that thousands of our fellow-creatures undergo a different lot...If, on the other hand, we be contending with the special grief, the intimate trial, the peculiar bitterness with which God has seen fit to mingle our own cup of existence, it is very good to know that our overcast lot is not singular...’
Mainly though, I have compiled the anthology as a sanity
preserver for myself, in a world which is becoming increasingly hard for me to bear, thanks to the neurological disease with which I was struck over a decade ago. One rarely receives much understanding these days when suffering under such a burden as this illness is to me, for the same humanistic traits which prevent peoples’ acceptance of melancholy, also distort and pervert their natural perceptions as to what should be the normal reaction to adversity. So used are we to seeing images on our screens or pictures in our newspapers of smiling people in wheelchairs2 who refuse to give up hope of a cure for their illness and whose attitude of cheerful optimism is sold to us as the ideal towards which we all should strive, that those far more normal individuals who experience fear, grief and heartache are frequently denied the support they long for and are instead exhorted to ‘look on the bright side’.
All the writings in my anthology are different, yet in some
intrinsic way they are all the same. Some are about depression itself - the isolation, the emptiness, the feeling that, ‘All is vanity and nothingness’,3 but many are about the reasons for, or situations related to, depression, and there is a sense in which they can all be summed up in Thomas Hardy’s statement that ‘Happiness is but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain’. Change and loss are the twin strands that run through everything in the anthology, for the only
2. The most repulsive I have seen was a magazine advert for wheelchairs, described as being available in
'a stunning range of colours' and showing a photograph of a woman no older than 40 waving cheerily
and smiling blissfully. I find this kind of trivialisation of disability almost as nauseating as that I
encountered whilst typing a nursing sister's thesis. This included a true account of the case of a young woman in her twenties who had had to have an emergency colostomy. Having been married for less than a year, the girl was not unnaturally very depressed and deeply concerned at how her condition would affect sexual relations with her husband. In the typically patronising language of today's humanistic health service, the sister had written, 'To put her mind at ease, I encouraged her to think positively about her situation and assured her that colostomy bags come in a range of pretty colours, some featuring floral designs which can be chosen by herself and her husband together' (!!)
3. James Thompson, City of Dreadful Night
thing in life about which we can be absolutely certain is that nothing good will last, for in the end, we will lose everything that was ever worth having. (Ironically, the converse is not true; bad things – pain, disease, poverty, loneliness, fear, rejection – can, and frequently do, last a lifetime.)
The writings are also very personal to me. I have chosen them because the situation of which they speak is one with which I can identify, something I have been through once, or am still going through. I have never included anything just because I like it – I have to have lived it.
Because of my constant illness, I have to admit that many of the passages in the anthology are of less relevance to me now than they were at one time. This does not of course mean I have rejected them as legitimate causes of depression for others. I still remember, for instance, my intense horror of old age, which blighted much of my late 20s and early 30s, and it is only because most of the aspects I so feared have already come upon me (I now walk less well than the average 90 year old) that ageing is no longer a concern of mine.
There are, however, other passages which have become far more pertinent; in particular, those which concern illness and loss. How deeply I understand now what Johnson means in ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ when speaking of how a person, even in sickness, prays, ‘Enlarge my life with multitude of days!’, despite the fact that ‘life protracted is protracted woe’.
Even more so can I identify with Matthew Arnold’s, ‘We mortal millions live alone’. For although this is true to a certain extent for everyone in all situations, there is nothing in the world quite so alienating and isolating as chronic
disease. Disease not only makes a person self-absorbed by necessity, it separates him from all normality, making shared experience an impossibility.
When, for instance, I am out in the garden with my daughter and husband, having a barbecue on a summer's evening, there is a sense in which I am not with them at all. For I am not experiencing what they are experiencing - I am not 'lost' in the smells of chargrilled meat and fresh mown grass; in the sounds of the singing birds and baaing sheep; I am isolated from many of the pleasures of family life; of closeness, of laughter. Unable to escape from the pain and weariness of my crippled body, constantly tormented by the anguish and despair of my burdened mind, like a caged beast at a zoo, I gaze with aching longing at a world I used to love but which is lost to me forever. How can I expect anyone to understand such feelings, or blame them because they don't? More than anything else in life, illness builds a wall which divides the sufferer from the healthy; yet, ironically, there is never a time one needs help, comfort and love so much as when one is ill. And never a time when one learns so
quickly the truth of Arnold's poignant words about the
heartbreaking condition of fallen man.
I recognise that my constant illness has played a significant part in my attitude to life in general (for even before I was struck with the foul neurological disease, I had been ill for many years). Had I been blessed with the good health which the majority of people enjoy today until their seventies or eighties my beliefs may well not have veered quite so naturally towards what the world calls ‘pessimism’. Nevertheless, my outlook would in general have been the same, as I do not think any other is possible for those who face up to, and seriously reflect upon, the realities of life.
The Christian psychologist, Larry Crabb, whose writings feature prominently in my anthology, believes that there are basically two types of people in the world - what he calls ‘shallow copers’ and ‘troubled reflectors’. He says that the people who fall into the first category are, ‘those who successfully ignore the inward ache and corruption and get on, more or less effectively, with life’. Rather than accept the fact that there is often no answer to life's problems, these people would rather live very superficially, refusing to grapple honestly with realities. However, those in the
second category are people ‘who, for whatever reason, are
gripped by an awareness that something is terribly wrong and, as a result, struggle in their efforts to move along through life.’
I am, and always have been, a troubled reflector. That I fall into this category is not a decision – nor is it a result merely of having been cursed with ill-health. It is just the category where nature and circumstance, temperament and upbringing have placed me, along with so many writers and thinkers whose melancholic dispositions have resulted in the poetry and prose which I feature in my anthology. Had I managed to enjoy life by being a shallow coper I think I would have settled for that, as I daresay most people would. When I hear the raucous laughter and drunken high-spirits of my next-door neighbours or listen to the superficial talk of my in-laws, who really think it matters what is on the ‘telly’ that evening, I feel an envy and longing to be like them from which an awareness of a superior understanding of the world gives little relief.
Few people nowadays could be said to fall into the category of troubled reflectors and our culture is sadly the worse for
that. For after all, it is pain which produces great work, not pleasure - and it is pain which is at the very heart of Creation.
Christ wept, he did not guffaw with laughter. He was a ‘man of sorrows and acquainted with grief’. In the Garden of Gethsemane he told his disciples that he was ‘exceeding sorrowful unto death’.
But today we live in a society which is fast ‘amusing itself to
Death.’4 Trivia, diversion, distraction and entertainment, (with a dose of sentimental humanism thrown in for good measure, typified by the hideous ‘Red Nose Day’) are what people want, and serious reflection is usually reserved for such vital issues as which mobile phone, package holiday or garden decking is the ‘coolest’ to purchase (and the one most destined to produce in others the ressentiment which is such a characteristic aspect of life in modern society.5
In the end, though, I believe that the outlook of the troubled
reflectors is the right one. Voltaire described optimism as, ‘The mania of maintaining that everything is well when we are wretched’, and John Baillie, author of the wonderful Christian book ‘And the Life Everlasting’, stresses that pessimism is often the correct and noble response to life and that ‘it would be nothing but shallowness of spirit for one who had no hope beyond the grave to cease to be obsessed by the fact of death...by facing it cheerfully.’
It is my hope that this anthology will be of some value in helping people who are experiencing any type of mental suffering for whatever reason. Just to read about others whoPREFACE
Until...man finds evil unmistakeably present in his
existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion.
Once pain has roused him, he knows he is in some way or
other, ‘up against’ the real universe...1
This is not a book about depression. I have included no tips on ‘how to banish the blues’ nor offered any suggestions as to which is the best type of therapy to try. Whilst acknowledging the existence of what is known as ‘clinical depression’ this is not what I am concerned with in my anthology. Rather, it has been my aim in compiling the anthology to try to get across a truth which is becoming increasingly difficult to hear in a society ever more dependent on inanity, trivia and falsehood.
This truth is that life, far from being the beach which our
modern age promises, is in fact, a very serious thing indeed, and if faced up to realistically is, to quote C.S. Lewis, quite simply ‘unbearable’. Sadly, few people do now face up to it realistically, preferring instead to live in a permanent Disneyland where such things as Big Brother, the National Lottery and the plethora of characters who star in the nation's favourite soap opera, ‘The News’, assume a greater importance and reality than their own lives and those of their family, friends and community. So wedded now is our culture to humanistic ideology, with its emphasis on Positive Thinking, Progress and Optimism, that anyone who does face up to real life and, as a result, suffers emotionally, is judged as being ‘disturbed’ and in need of ‘help’.
1. C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
But the late Erich Fromm, an eminent German psychiatrist,
believed that in actual fact the opposite is true, and that it is
usually the people whom society calls disturbed or 'neurotic' who are the ones most humanly alive and sane. For, he said, though the ‘neurotic’ increasingly experiences a sense of despair and anguish, there is always hope for him, because he is reacting as a healthy person should react, whereas conversely, those whom society considers 'normal' are the really hopeless victims.
‘Many of them are normal’, said Fromm, ‘because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence [and] their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not...struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.’
As a person whom ‘normal’ people have long deemed to be
‘neurotic’ and in need of ‘treatment’ I have compiled this
anthology in an attempt to defend my deeply-held belief that low spirits, sadness, melancholy and depression are not usually symptoms of a disease from which we need to be ‘cured’ but are in actual fact often the correct and rational responses of thinking human beings to life in a fallen world.
Another reason why I have compiled the anthology is that I
believe there is much purpose served in reading about the distress of others. As Charlotte Bronte wrote, ‘If we ourselves live in fullness of content, it is well to be reminded that thousands of our fellow-creatures undergo a different lot...If, on the other hand, we be contending with the special grief, the intimate trial, the peculiar bitterness with which God has seen fit to mingle our own cup of existence, it is very good to know that our overcast lot is not singular...’
Mainly though, I have compiled the anthology as a sanity
preserver for myself, in a world which is becoming increasingly hard for me to bear, thanks to the neurological disease with which I was struck over a decade ago. One rarely receives much understanding these days when suffering under such a burden as this illness is to me, for the same humanistic traits which prevent peoples’ acceptance of melancholy, also distort and pervert their natural perceptions as to what should be the normal reaction to adversity. So used are we to seeing images on our screens or pictures in our newspapers of smiling people in wheelchairs2 who refuse to give up hope of a cure for their illness and whose attitude of cheerful optimism is sold to us as the ideal towards which we all should strive, that those far more normal individuals who experience fear, grief and heartache are frequently denied the support they long for and are instead exhorted to ‘look on the bright side’.
All the writings in my anthology are different, yet in some
intrinsic way they are all the same. Some are about depression itself - the isolation, the emptiness, the feeling that, ‘All is vanity and nothingness’,3 but many are about the reasons for, or situations related to, depression, and there is a sense in which they can all be summed up in Thomas Hardy’s statement that ‘Happiness is but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain’. Change and loss are the twin strands that run through everything in the anthology, for the only
2. The most repulsive I have seen was a magazine advert for wheelchairs, described as being available in
'a stunning range of colours' and showing a photograph of a woman no older than 40 waving cheerily
and smiling blissfully. I find this kind of trivialisation of disability almost as nauseating as that I
encountered whilst typing a nursing sister's thesis. This included a true account of the case of a young woman in her twenties who had had to have an emergency colostomy. Having been married for less than a year, the girl was not unnaturally very depressed and deeply concerned at how her condition would affect sexual relations with her husband. In the typically patronising language of today's humanistic health service, the sister had written, 'To put her mind at ease, I encouraged her to think positively about her situation and assured her that colostomy bags come in a range of pretty colours, some featuring floral designs which can be chosen by herself and her husband together' (!!)
3. James Thompson, City of Dreadful Night
thing in life about which we can be absolutely certain is that nothing good will last, for in the end, we will lose everything that was ever worth having. (Ironically, the converse is not true; bad things – pain, disease, poverty, loneliness, fear, rejection – can, and frequently do, last a lifetime.)
The writings are also very personal to me. I have chosen them because the situation of which they speak is one with which I can identify, something I have been through once, or am still going through. I have never included anything just because I like it – I have to have lived it.
Because of my constant illness, I have to admit that many of the passages in the anthology are of less relevance to me now than they were at one time. This does not of course mean I have rejected them as legitimate causes of depression for others. I still remember, for instance, my intense horror of old age, which blighted much of my late 20s and early 30s, and it is only because most of the aspects I so feared have already come upon me (I now walk less well than the average 90 year old) that ageing is no longer a concern of mine.
There are, however, other passages which have become far more pertinent; in particular, those which concern illness and loss. How deeply I understand now what Johnson means in ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ when speaking of how a person, even in sickness, prays, ‘Enlarge my life with multitude of days!’, despite the fact that ‘life protracted is protracted woe’.
Even more so can I identify with Matthew Arnold’s, ‘We mortal millions live alone’. For although this is true to a certain extent for everyone in all situations, there is nothing in the world quite so alienating and isolating as chronic
disease. Disease not only makes a person self-absorbed by necessity, it separates him from all normality, making shared experience an impossibility.
When, for instance, I am out in the garden with my daughter and husband, having a barbecue on a summer's evening, there is a sense in which I am not with them at all. For I am not experiencing what they are experiencing - I am not 'lost' in the smells of chargrilled meat and fresh mown grass; in the sounds of the singing birds and baaing sheep; I am isolated from many of the pleasures of family life; of closeness, of laughter. Unable to escape from the pain and weariness of my crippled body, constantly tormented by the anguish and despair of my burdened mind, like a caged beast at a zoo, I gaze with aching longing at a world I used to love but which is lost to me forever. How can I expect anyone to understand such feelings, or blame them because they don't? More than anything else in life, illness builds a wall which divides the sufferer from the healthy; yet, ironically, there is never a time one needs help, comfort and love so much as when one is ill. And never a time when one learns so
quickly the truth of Arnold's poignant words about the
heartbreaking condition of fallen man.
I recognise that my constant illness has played a significant part in my attitude to life in general (for even before I was struck with the foul neurological disease, I had been ill for many years). Had I been blessed with the good health which the majority of people enjoy today until their seventies or eighties my beliefs may well not have veered quite so naturally towards what the world calls ‘pessimism’. Nevertheless, my outlook would in general have been the same, as I do not think any other is possible for those who face up to, and seriously reflect upon, the realities of life.
The Christian psychologist, Larry Crabb, whose writings feature prominently in my anthology, believes that there are basically two types of people in the world - what he calls ‘shallow copers’ and ‘troubled reflectors’. He says that the people who fall into the first category are, ‘those who successfully ignore the inward ache and corruption and get on, more or less effectively, with life’. Rather than accept the fact that there is often no answer to life's problems, these people would rather live very superficially, refusing to grapple honestly with realities. However, those in the
second category are people ‘who, for whatever reason, are
gripped by an awareness that something is terribly wrong and, as a result, struggle in their efforts to move along through life.’
I am, and always have been, a troubled reflector. That I fall into this category is not a decision – nor is it a result merely of having been cursed with ill-health. It is just the category where nature and circumstance, temperament and upbringing have placed me, along with so many writers and thinkers whose melancholic dispositions have resulted in the poetry and prose which I feature in my anthology. Had I managed to enjoy life by being a shallow coper I think I would have settled for that, as I daresay most people would. When I hear the raucous laughter and drunken high-spirits of my next-door neighbours or listen to the superficial talk of my in-laws, who really think it matters what is on the ‘telly’ that evening, I feel an envy and longing to be like them from which an awareness of a superior understanding of the world gives little relief.
Few people nowadays could be said to fall into the category of troubled reflectors and our culture is sadly the worse for
that. For after all, it is pain which produces great work, not pleasure - and it is pain which is at the very heart of Creation.
Christ wept, he did not guffaw with laughter. He was a ‘man of sorrows and acquainted with grief’. In the Garden of Gethsemane he told his disciples that he was ‘exceeding sorrowful unto death’.
But today we live in a society which is fast ‘amusing itself to
Death.’4 Trivia, diversion, distraction and entertainment, (with a dose of sentimental humanism thrown in for good measure, typified by the hideous ‘Red Nose Day’) are what people want, and serious reflection is usually reserved for such vital issues as which mobile phone, package holiday or garden decking is the ‘coolest’ to purchase (and the one most destined to produce in others the ressentiment which is such a characteristic aspect of life in modern society.5
In the end, though, I believe that the outlook of the troubled
reflectors is the right one. Voltaire described optimism as, ‘The mania of maintaining that everything is well when we are wretched’, and John Baillie, author of the wonderful Christian book ‘And the Life Everlasting’, stresses that pessimism is often the correct and noble response to life and that ‘it would be nothing but shallowness of spirit for one who had no hope beyond the grave to cease to be obsessed by the fact of death...by facing it cheerfully.’
It is my hope that this anthology will be of some value in helping people who are experiencing any type of mental suffering for whatever reason. Just to read about others who
4. Title of an excellent book by Neil Postman which addresses how television has transformed our
culture into one vast arena for show business.
5. This is a French word, only weakly translated by the English 'resentment', which means the
passionate envy of the qualities, possessions or lifestyle of another, carried to the point of hatred and
spite. As Charles Sykes says in 'A Nation of Victims', 'By declaring that all manner of joy is...attainable,
[modern] culture manufactures a perpetual sense of grievance...and the expansion of the notion of
happiness also permits extraordinary enlargements and refinements in the most ancient human trait:
envy. The multiplication of choices...has expanded exponentially the potential for jealousy. If I am not
happy, why not? And if my neighbour is...what does he know that I don't?'
have been through what they themselves are going through can be immensely helpful, particularly in these modern times
when ‘we are never less alone than when alone.’6
Surrounded by ‘experts’ on every side, who tell us what to eat, what to think, how to behave, how to feel, in every situation; unable to escape the media's intrusive presence which forces on us a world with a perpetually smiling face, it is fast becoming almost a privilege to be allowed to be miserable in peace.
I should like to think also that my anthology will help dispel the lie that ‘life’s a beach’, and that it will encourage those people who believe it – ‘ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and who pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow’7, to instead face up to truth.
But sadly, there is little chance of that happening. Few people today have any interest in truth; nor in the reflection which is necessary to bring about an awareness of it. When modern life offers so many diversions and distractions; so many chances to avoid ever having to think about anything at all; so many opportunities of drowning out the ‘still small voice’ with the slick, loud-mouthed voices of the DJs and TV presenters, the sports commentators and newsreaders, whose main job is to keep the masses entertained with constant bread and circuses8 who is going to choose truth, which is too much like hard work?
6. C.S. Lewis, Membership
7. Samuel Johnson, History of Rasselas
8. A phrase used by the Roman satirist, Juvenal, to deplore the declining heroism and culture of Romans after the Republic ceased to exist. It has become a general term to explain the short-term, shallow interests of the public which modern Governments happily exploit. Juvenal said, ‘the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things - bread and circuses.’
In the end, I realise that few people will be ‘converted’ to a belief system and lifestyle which asks them to give up hiding amongst the shadows of the world's distractions. But for those who are unable to find anything other than very temporary relief in these distractions; for whom even deeply-held religious beliefs fail to offer much solace (as regards this life); who seek in vain for something out of reach, unattainable (T.S. Eliot’s ‘wild thyme unseen’, ‘the unheard music hidden in the shrubbery’), I hope this anthology (almost a celebration of ‘melancholy’) will be of
some use. For in order to reach Eliot’s ‘open field on a summer midnight’9, we have to pass through his ‘dark, cold and empty desolation, the wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters of the petrel and the porpoise.’ If we do so, we can be certain we are on the right road.
‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that now goeth on his way weeping, and beareth forth good seed shall...come again with joy, and bring his sheaves with him.’ (Psalm 126)
9. Four Quartets
THE AGONY ABIDES
Dedicated to three Johns to whom I will always be inestimably grateful: John Daulman, ex-vicar of St. Anne’s Parish Church, Turton; John Davenport, ex-Head of Music at Bolton School Girls’ Division, and John Powell, ex-Head of Bolton School Joint Chamber Choir
They are all very special people who helped to ease the pain of my life in many different ways. Thanks to them, I have never stopped believing that there is a better world than this where we will all meet again one day…
I am a reasonably attractive (well, was before I became chronically ill) woman with brown hair and green eyes. I am a very serious, thoughtful and deep thinking person who tends to not make friends easily as most people do not share my realistic (they call it pessimistic) philosophy. I love Ernest Hemingway's comment when he said, 'Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.' Touche.