“I hope you’re not thinking of anything of the sort.”
“Oh, I shall kill myself one of these days,” said Antoine, cheerfully. “But it will not be for love. No. I am not so détraqué as all that.”
—DOROTHY L. SAYERS, Have His Carcase
But that doesn’t matter anymore, if it ever did. She wasn’t real.That is, the girl I was in love with (it’s excruciating to write those words without attempting to add an ironic twitch of the eyebrow, so to speak) had nothing in common with the real person who ate, drank, wore glasses, didn’t wash her hair, slouched in her seat, and flirted maddeningly with every male she met. I still can’t think of her actual physical presence without something inside me melting, something that’s been in deep freeze for months now. I wrote once that I was in love with, among other things, “the complex relationship between waist and hip.” That sounds forced and hollow to me now. In memory, what really remains is the tender curve of her lips melting into her full cheek. And even that is fading.
She may be engaged now; maybe even married. There was a young man, several years our junior, who was clearly jealous of my interest in her. The last time I saw her, he kept trying to get her to admit that she was engaged to be married. She wasn’t stupid, knew that I carried a torch for her, and with infinite tact denied it and changed the subject.
Yes, I actually said I carried a torch for her. It seems the best expression of what I felt then and still, though less intensely, feel now. One of the worst casualties of the modern spirit of irony and intellectual distance, it seems to me, is the capacity to express ordinary human passions without resorting either to Hallmark vapidity or pop-psychology mush. At times like this I could almost identify with the desire of Romanticism to break away from the arid cynicism of the Age of Reason. (Ignore that last bit, if you like; it’s just the suppressed history reader bubbling to the top.)
Anyway, the girl. (“How does the girl fit in the picture?” “Don’t you ever go to the movies? There’s always a girl in the picture!” Preston Sturges, Sullivan’s Travels.) I allowed myself to fall in love with her three years ago. I spent a largely-sleepless night trying to decide what to do about it. Finally, I made my decision: I would tell her, see what she thought about it, and go from there. I was going to drive her home after a party. Alone together in a car, a long drive, the perfect opportunity. She turned to me in a glow of girlish excitement to tell me that the cutest guy in the world had just asked for her phone number. After an infinitesimal pause, I congratulated her, and we drove to her home in silence.
I don’t seem to have any other option but to reject the idea that I should have been less wishy-washy. If I had been more assertive, if I were the kind of person who could be more assertive, I would be somebody else. Anyway, I don’t intend to detail the one-sided love affair that dragged on for two years as we drifted farther and farther apart. The last time I spoke to her was to arrange a theater date she didn’t show up for. I moved to Tucson and went back to school.
So here I am, trying to express in such irritatingly analytical and self-pitying terms what I take to be the central theme of my existence. In a word, failure.
I’m reminded of a Peanuts strip, quoted from memory because I’m far away from my books and I’m not sure I even have this one strip anyway. Charlie Brown is showing someone, I think Schroeder, what books he’s been reading lately: “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire… The Decline of the West… The Decline of Baseball….” (wait for it; no one is as rhythmically precise as Schulz) “…I’ve always been fascinated by failure!”
Charlie Brown, of course, has always been fascinated by failure because he is a failure. He never got the red-headed girl, he never won a baseball game, he never kicked that goddamn football. I seem to be helpless against the belief that my life has worked out along similar lines. But since I’m not sure how to avoid being maudlin while listing the ways in which I think I’m a failure, I’ll skip that part and ask you to take my word for it.
* * *
In preparation for writing this essay, I’ve tried hard to recapture moments in my life when I felt extremely depressed. During my sophomore year of high school, as I liked to tell people during my junior and senior years, I actively contemplated suicide, though while I’ve mentally revisited the topic occasionally, it’s never even gotten so far as considering ways and means. (The thought of suicide, for me, takes the place of the revenge fantasies that other socially awkward obsessives entertain: the adolescent whinge par excellance of “you’ll all be sorry when I’m dead,” that blessed ideal that Tom Sawyer got to live through, about sums it up.) Next in my catalogue of depressions is the year I spent in a blue funk when I had to give up going to a small liberal arts college which I dearly loved because I couldn’t afford it any longer. And during the romantic farce outlined above, I took several dead-end jobs in data entry and watched in fascinated horror as my (admittedly amateurish) concept of what life should be slowly unraveled before my eyes. I’m an expert at feeling bad.
Funny thing, though: I couldn’t recapture the feelings. Even though I spent much of last semester hoping in a minor way that a bus would run over me, just for a change of pace, and have certainly not run out of stupidities with which to reproach myself, I haven’t been able to conjure up a really good depression. I’m not sure why.
One of my favorite theories is that I’m living in a fool’s paradise, and that any minute now the other shoe will kick me in the groin, and I’ll spiral into a deeper depression than any I’ve experienced before and find myself unable to get out of bed for a week and fail all my classes. But I have to, with great reluctance because it’s always more savage fun to look on the gloomy side, discard that idea. I’ll never be able to remain in a tailspin long enough to lose all control, because I’m simply too promiscuous with my attention. The long aching nights when I pounded a dampened pillow and screamed silently at God also witnessed long irrelevant musings on whatever I happened to be interested in that week: disposable Sixties pop groups, or New Yorker cartoons, or John Cusack’s body of work, or an ancient African civilization, or Georgette Heyer novels, or trashy superhero comics, or Radiohead, or The Simpsons, or Edwardian England, or the Second Vatican Council, or Twenties musicals, or an Umberto Eco essay from a month before. Practically anything can take me outside of myself, even my responsibilities.
Another possible reason I might have such difficulty conjuring depression, after six years in which I’ve believed (but in a, you know, abstract, playful way) that all I had to do was let my guard down and be swallowed up by the void, is that I now have a purpose in life, shabby and ill-considered as it might be: to finish school. But I’ve always (more or less) had a purpose, and I’m hardly so naïve as to think that a diploma will fix all my worries.
So why am I, if not happy, at least blasé? Part of it, undoubtedly, is that I’m growing older. It’s harder to maintain any emotion as I continue to cake myself in layers of intellectualizing and irony. Also, I’m far too busy to allow depression to seep in. Between work, school, and trying to beat my personal best at computer Solitaire, I haven’t time to reflect on my failings and things left undone. Then, too, perhaps depression has a mind of its own and will not come when called. If I actually want to stare into the abyss, I may not be in the right frame of mind to do so.
“Nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around,” grins Calvin fiendishly in an early-nineties Calvin & Hobbes. When I read that as a boy, I didn’t think it was very apposite: certainly when I had a grouch, I preferred to be left alone to indulge it. Now, however, it seems as though there’s something in it. Not that I feel an urge to make others unhappy; my adolescent readings of de Sade (for, erhm, educational purposes) didn’t pass that trick onto me. But nothing helps a bad mood like exposing it, like a fresh wound, to the air. Perhaps that, ultimately, is why I find it so difficult to maintain depression: my black rage, rather than feeding off of concern, fear, and responding anger, smashes itself impotently against the massive walls of indifference all around me. In the university, I am invisible. If I died, no one would mourn. So my will to die has atrophied accordingly.
* * *
I mistrust people who don’t hate themselves. It seems to me that a central aspect of humanity is missing from anyone who looks at themselves uncritically, a vital organ that other ages called a conscience. I say this entirely without irony, though not, perhaps, free from the desire to shock. Self-loathing is a sign of accurate perception, because everybody has loathsome qualities. (To detractors: just because an idea is sophomoric doesn’t mean it can’t be true.)
It is (what I like to imagine as) the cold, hard, steely-eyed look at myself that is the most rewarding part of depression, the element that lends the blues their unique tangy savor. It begins, as most criticisms do, with generalities. I point out to myself that I am a fuckhead, a piece of shit, a snivelling little asshole, and all the rest of it. I call into question my sanity, my intelligence, my parentage, and the state of my immortal soul. And then I get into specifics. Here’s a current favorite, dreamed up on a walk across campus last January:
Heh. You know what? It’s a good thing you’ve never had a girlfriend or even really kissed a girl. I’d hate to imagine what kind of children you’d bring into the world. If they didn’t turn out completely hopeless from the womb, your parenting would doom them to be myopic little geeks even worse off than yourself. The poor little buggers wouldn’t even get a chance to be normal. Yep, it’s a lucky break for the gene pool that you’ve never dived in. Let your shitheadedness die with you.
I whittled it down eventually to an aphorism, “Good thing I’m a virgin, because it would be catastrophic if I ever reproduced,” the cynicism of which pleased me so much that I spent the rest of the day in a sunny mood.
My ability to be easily cheered is, of course, something else I can hate myself for. (It’s also a tightly-guarded secret: if my loved ones ever found out that all they had to do to relieve a foul mood was to get me to laugh, I’d never enjoy a good sulk again.) Cheerfulness is a symptom of empty-headedness—the ostrich syndrome—and I despise a trivial attitude towards life. Seriousness, not to say somberness, is an appropriate attitude towards the world in which we find ourselves, regardless of what hedonistic Western materialism tells us. This is the philosophical justification behind my depression: Yes, you idiot, it really is that bad.
I should note, perhaps, that philosophical, like psychological, health requires that a frank appraisal of the overwhelming evils of life be balanced by an equally frank recognition of the wonder, beauty, and joy also available to the living. Only by holding simultaneously in our minds both agony and ecstasy can we approach the heart of the matter (I feel that I should at least mention Graham Greene’s name after that sentence, just out of politeness). But if I were to develop this theme too much, this would end up being one of those irritating essays which attempt to answer the Big Questions of Life. I much prefer insight doled out in fragments—it’s more lifelike.
* * *
G. K. Chesterton, in nearly everything my acknowledged master (even, if the term can have any literary application, my sensei), wrote that suicide was condemned by the medieval church because it represented a violent rejection of all the good that earth has to offer. A murderer only blots out one life; a suicide blots out the universe. In my darkest moods, I disagree.
Suicide, as preached and practiced by the Stoics, is indeed a rejection—but of evil, not of good. It is the last resort, when the pain of the world overwhelms one to such a degree that that the only escape is death. It is a rejection of the world, because the world does not meet the suicide’s standards. Chesterton saw this as colossal arrogance. I see it, briefly, as a noble cause. Sometimes it’s worth saying “fuck you” to the world.
You can stop muttering “cry for help” to yourself now. I will not commit suicide, partly because I do believe, and am apparently powerless to stop believing, that “the Everlasting has fix’d/His canon ’gainst self-slaughter,” and partly because I’m too much of a sheer physical coward. These are the two dams I have always run up against when thinking about the topic, and my mind diverts naturally into other channels.
* * *
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, to a post-Freudian generation, it is my lack of romantic/sexual experience that bothers me most when I’m depressed. Or to cast it in terms I would recognize: I hunger for companionship at the most intimate of levels, intellectual not less than physical. Strangely enough, the fictional encounters that pierce me like a spear are never sex scenes; they’re conversations. But surely I’ve had my share of conversations; why should that be such a particular hunger? (I mean, besides the obvious analogy: I’ve never eaten truffles, so descriptions of them do nothing for me; a description of a good juicy hamburger, however….) Is there any way to call myself a romantic without sounding either goopy or affected?
Prufrock mutters hollowly beside me. “I grow old….” Well, older than the bronzed sorority nymphets one sees everywhere, at any rate. “Shall I part my hair behind?” Let it grow out a bit first. “I will wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.” I’m tired of walking alone, everywhere I go. I want to share observations with someone without the intermediary of text. (But then, I’m terrified of boring them. At least with text I can toss in sarcastic parenthetical remarks.)
“I do not think that they will sing for me.” No. No, that’s become increasingly obvious.
* * *
It’s early morning. Time to get some coffee. I’ll need to stay awake through the rest of the day.
And with that thought, a painful pause seizes my innards. The girl, the one I talked about in the beginning, used to claim that caffeine had absolutely no effect on her whatever. I realize with a queer sinking feeling that I never got to test that claim.
And I have to remind myself, again, that she wasn’t real.