The Noonday Demon

druthers,

You survive depression through a faith in life that is as abstract as any religious belief system.

Outward Bound attempts to keep to Hahn’s objectives: “I regard it as the foremost task of education to ensure survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity; an undefeatable spirit; tenacity in pursuit; readiness for sensible self-denial; and, above all, compassion.”

and forth between man and woman to suit the various circumstances that they encounter together and separately.

They need to go together: by themselves pills are a weak poison, love a blunt knife, insight a rope that snaps under too much strain. With the lot of them, if you are lucky, you can save the tree from the vine.

theological, the psychological, and the biological.

A terrible imminence overtakes entirely the present moment.

“Families must guard themselves,” Kay Jamison once said to me, “against the contagion of hopelessness.”

“Medicines treat depression,” my therapist said to me. “I treat depressives.”