Not Just Waiting Around For It

Enough of dark and cold!

Oh, where to begin? A random plunge? 

 

Above is the title (perhaps no longer appropriate?) that I used for a first draft, now discarded—lengthy paragraphs that wound on and on, giving excessive background on my experience with unsought joy, revisiting at length past days of happiness (back in “the old Vienna,” as the Artist loved to say) before arriving, at last, to the place where I find myself now, where being open to the possibility of joy and ready to welcome it when it comes is not enough. In the present place intention is required. I need to seek joy out with the expectation of finding it.

Sunrise again -- that's better!

That, briefly, was the theme I had in mind, but my intention took a beating, even after having been written down and gone over repeatedly, pen retracing the words over and over, the words spoken aloud, visualization effected—the whole nine yards. All that, and yet joy eluded me. Irritability, not joy, was my companion. Rats!

 

Have you ever had meditation go sour on you? My intention session itself was fine, but joy did not (shall we say) manifest. And irritability is not much of a muse! No one wants to hear about it! We don’t need that from each other, do we? So I held off posting anything new here—especially after a comment from one reader about how he came to Books in Northport for “positivity”!

 

What brought on the bad mood? A combination of factors. For me personally, this is a difficult month, with a string of three-year-old milestones lying in wait on the calendar, but there is also the dark, dark cloud hanging over our country and the world, a cloud impossible to dispel and very difficult to put out of mind for long. 

 

Then, too, I was in the midst of a reading slump! Whether that was cause or effect of the mood, I cannot tell. I only know that Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, after an evening spent with it, struck me as silly and pointless and that I subsequently abandoned Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall halfway through, after the introduction had filled me with eagerness for the story. Eschewing literature after two or three impatient nights, I spent a couple of evenings with one of Lillian Braun Jackson’s Cat-Who mysteries and a big bag of potato chips, wallowing in escape reading and junk food.

 

(It really wasn't much of a party.)

My next reading choice, The Personal Librarian, was a relief and a step up. Authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray kept me turning pages in their engrossing work of historical fiction, and I have now ordered a biography of Belle da Costa Greene to see how known facts of her life stack up against the fiction. As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Greene occupied a unique position in the world of art and book auctions of the period, her uniqueness taking on added poignancy 49 years after her death, when it was discovered that her birth certificate identified her as “colored.” It’s that secret identity that drives The Personal Librarian, certainly a fascinating aspect of the woman’s life, but I would like to know much more about how she learned about rare books and am hoping the biography will tell me that.

 

What really turned the tide of my mood, however, was the novel Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson, a spellbinding story of a complicated family with complicated secrets, all connected by a recipe from “the island” that was their ancestral home. It was a book that carried me away and, finally, lifted me up. Awake half the night over its pages, only turning out the light after the book repeated fell from my hands as sleep overtook me, I had a happy reason to wake up in the morning: I had that book to finish! 

Have you ever had that feeling in the morning? Remembering as you came awake that an irresistible book was right there waiting for you? (So much better than only waking once again to the continuing nightmare of the current American political scene!) Now I see that Charmaine Wilkerson has published another novel, Good Dirt, and I am eager to get my hands on that, confident I will not be disappointed. 

Most highly recommended!

Switching gears for a moment: Meanwhile, when was the last time Sunny Juliet and I went to the dog park? When did poor Sunny last see anyone other than her dog mom? We’ve been alone too long!

This is her impatient face, between barks. Sigh!

What with bitter cold weather and then five days without our plow guy, it was a siege of togetherness, but I remedied that sorry situation for my girl on Sunday (though I rarely get photos at the dog park and didn’t on Sunday). On the way back through the village, I stopped at my bookshop only intending to snap one photo for my other blog, but then a family appeared, outside, gazing wistfully through the windows. I went to the door. “Would you like to come in?” They would! We visited, talked dogs, and they bought books—altogether a perfect encounter!

 

Back to reading: I’ll mention one more book here today. I’d ordered two copies of it, apparently, and then for the life of me could not remember why. The title, Faith, Hope and Carnage, seemed to threaten politics, but the content was actually a lengthy interview with an Australian musician whose work was entirely unknown to me, Nick Cave. (I know, I know—I’m totally out of it!) In an attempt to refresh my memory, I opened the book.

Not knowing what to expect, I am drawn in.

Even knowing nothing of songwriter-performer Cave’s work, I was taken by the way he talked about his creative process. Improvisation with collaborator Warren Ellis, he is quick to point out, is a lot more and something completely other than “winging it” (the interviewer’s suggestion).

 

No, that’s really not the case. We weren’t just two guys who don’t know what they’re doing. There’s a deep intuitive understanding between the two of us and, of course, twenty-five years of us working together. It’s an informed improvisation, a mindful improvisation. 

 

This theme of experienced, mindful improvisation comes up again. 

 

…[For] magical thing to happen, there has to be certain things in place. It can’t just be a couple of guys who don’t know what they’re doing, sitting around bashing shit out.

 

Cave’s seriousness about his music came clearly through his articulate statements, and without knowing anything of his music I was fascinated, but that wasn’t all. In the interview, he also talks a lot about God, about faith and doubt.

 

…[O]ne way I try [to find deliverance from suffering] is to try to lead a life that has moral and religious value, and to try to look at other people, all people, as if they are valuable. … I guess what I am saying is—we mean something. Our actions mean something. We are of value.

 

I thought of a friend of mine and a book she and her late husband worked on for years. She will recognize their work’s conclusions in Cave’s words, I know. 

 

And still there was more. This famous person completely outside my ken had, it seems, lost two of his four sons to death, losses that greatly informed both his music and his religious beliefs, and he has given a lot of consideration to grief and how it changes us—one of the major themes of my own life for the past three years, as you know. He speaks of the physicality of grief as “a kind of annihilation of the self—an interior screaming.” But he also speculates that “perhaps God is the trauma itself,” words that need a little more explanation: 

 

That perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things.

 

He speaks of grief as “transformative,” in which we may be “essentially altered or remade.” Another friend will perhaps be reminded by these words of our conversation on Sunday evening.

 

More of the book remains for me to read than what I have read so far, but I will definitely continue with it, as the themes resonate perfectly with this month of milestone days in my life—my husband’s hospitalizations, surgeries, his birthday, our last days together, and his death. 

 

Perhaps searing memories and my current reading of creativity and God and faith and grief in words from a musician who has had no part whatsoever in my listening life will not strike any of you as the joy my carefully worded intention sought to manifest, but it is what has come, and I am welcoming it. Taking it in. Seeing where it will take me in my improvised life during this last week of February as temperatures rise into the 30s, bringing rain to erode our mountains of plowed-up snow.

How long will this mountain last?

Where will the next weeks take me?

Medicine for Moody Times

Sometimes even mornings seem dark and brooding.

 

God forbid that I should say a word against a public library, but nothing will take the place or a rack of a shelf full of books by one’s own chair, close to a well-adjusted light, whether it be a lamp or a window. Everyone’s shelf will contain different books, and the books which give joy to youth may not delight age, but the pleasure of reading continues. I see to-day greater anxiety written on the faces of my millionaire friends than I do on the faces of the poor men who resort day after day to our public libraries, there to solace themselves with a book. In an established love of reading there is a policy of insurance guaranteeing certain happiness till death. 

 

-      A. Edward Newton, End Papers: Literary Recreations (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1933)

 

Newton was writing during the years of the Great Depression (“What was so great about it?” a young person might ask, and that would be a good question), when no doubt his “millionaire friends” had plenty of anxiety. But anxiety is not limited to millionaires, nor to periods of economic depression, so it is all the better insurance to those of us further down in the world’s financial hierarchy that public libraries still thrive in our United States and that personal, private collections of books can be had for very little -- though an occasional splurge, like the occasional cheesecake wedge for dessert, is not always to be resisted.

Newton, an American, was a serious high-end book collector, and his specialty was English literature – that is to say, he preferred books from “across the pond,” as he put it. For others he recommended Americana, specifically Walt Whitman; for himself, however, a book lacking any mention of Dr. Johnson rarely attracted him. Moreover, urban to the core, he had no interest in the world of nature. 

A noted exception to his Johnson/no nature rule was the fiction of Mary Webb, and he lauded her books so highly that I rushed to my bookshop shelves to find Precious Bane, smuggled it home that very night, and began reading Webb's masterpiece as soon as I closed the cover on End Papers.  

 

 

…It was a wonderful thing to see our meadows at Sarn when the cowslip was in blow. Gold-over they were, so that you would think not even an angel’s feet were good enough to walk there. … Every way you looked, there was nought but gold, saving towards Sarn, where the woods began, and the great stretch of grey water, gleaming and wincing in the sun. Neither woods nor water looked darksome in that fine spring weather, with the leaves coming new, and buds the color of corn in the birch-tops. Only in our oak wood there was always a look of the back-end of the year, their young leaves being so brown. So there was always a breath of October in our May. 

 

-      Mary Webb, Precious Bane (NY: Dutton, 1926)

 

 

Blooming cowslips (Michigan’s marsh marigolds) were known as paigle, or keys of heaven, to the natives of Mary Webb’s Shropshire meres. A much-neglected classic, I was ready to agree, after only two chapters of the novel. 

It is October now in Leelanau, always a quixotic month and this year alternating summer and autumn from one day to the next. By Sunday, had it settled down? Full, peak color and cold rain seemed to say yes, and while the colors gleamed in the rain, my mood was sad, or at least bittersweet. Although the Artist always used to say he loved the leafless trees in November and the time when the “bones of the earth” are laid bare, my memory calls back so many slow county cruises in October (following a getaway to the U.P. or Lake Huron in September) that seeing the beauty of the dying leaves by myself feels almost unbearable. 

Luckily, for whatever grip on sanity I possess, there is Sunny Juliet. Like October, Sunny has a variety of moods. Here is an introduction to a few of them, as demonstrated this past mid-October weekend.  

Looking goofy

Caught a mole!

Pretending it's time to get up.

Homework!

To my way of thinking, there is nothing like books and dogs to chase away the blues of politics and the approach of winter. 

Dark is coming earlier and earlier.

But can you see the tiny sliver of moon? Look closely!

“No, how are you, really?”

Recently I wrote, in two consecutive posts, about feeling “crabby” one morning -- the same day, written about twice, because the hours had divided themselves into a morning of outdoor adventure and afternoon of indoor reading. Now, in light of a book I devoured in two days of intense reading, I want to revisit that day briefly before getting into the book. 

Saying I’d been “crabby” when I first got up wasn’t a falsehood, but the word was not as accurate as another I could have used. Initially the word that came to mind that morning, without my having to search for it at all, was abandoned. I felt abandoned. 

But when I wrote about the day, I didn’t want to name my feeling so bluntly-- didn’t want to sound pathetic or self-pitying and discourage people from reading any further – the risk I’m taking today. After all, abandonment was, and is, hardly an objective fact of my life: I have family, friends, neighbors, dog; I see people and receive phone calls and text and e-mails and even postcards and letters in my physical mailbox down the road. To feel abandoned, then, was not a logical, rational thought. The feeling, however, was real and deep. Abandoned. Bereft. Because absence is a constant presence in my life now and can demand to be recognized when I least expect it.

Days before, I had started a very different post, a brutally honest one, thinking it the beginning of a draft for next month. “The Cruelest Month,” I titled those paragraphs, writing that the cruelest month wasn’t April for me, as the poet would have it, but March: Since my husband died last year in March (nine days after his February birthday), last year’s “cascade” of medical issues, beginning in January and ending in death, now repeats itself as a cascade of unavoidable memories, with the anniversary of the end looming ever closer.

Thus the feeling of being abandoned -- although I need to explain further that feeling abandoned does not necessarily correlate to being alone. Sometimes I am perfectly happy alone (as when reading that paper by Georges Poulet), while other times (not always!) with other people I can feel like a sad little island, abandoned in a sea of grief. Because widowhood is not all one color. Every day is not grey and rainy and dismal. 

And speaking of weather, I have always found my moods affected by weather (and used to tell the Artist, “I’m a very shallow person” for that very reason), but grief can make warm sunshine seem pointless, whereas a rainy day can give the perfect excuse to curl up alone, contentedly, and read a book. People, weather – sometimes they encourage certain feelings, and other times the feelings are completely at odds with what’s going on in the “outside” world – that is, outside one’s own head, heart, and skin.

In her new book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, Susan Cain (author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking) explores the tendency of some of us to what Aristotle called ‘melancholy,’ those feelings of 

…longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death –bitter and sweet – are forever paired.

From sadness, creativity, seeking unconditional human love or divine love, and the American gospel of positive thinking to grief and loss, “getting over it,” immortality, and intergenerational pain, this book goes broad and deep. There is the story, perhaps apocryphal (and maybe you’ve read it before, as I have), of Franz Kafka giving, to a little girl heartbroken after losing her favorite doll, a new doll with a letter he wrote as if the old doll had written it: “My travels have changed me.” For everyone who has ever lived, change and loss are inevitable, and when they come, life will never again be what it was. 

(Typing that last sentence, the one just above, I first typed “For anyone who has ever loved….” Has anyone ever lived without loving? Such a life would not keep one safe from change and loss. It would not be much of a life at all.)

It's too early in the year to know if Bittersweet will be the most important book I’ll read in 2023, but I know it is one I will be recommending to others and will re-read again and again myself. It is much, much more personal than Cain’s earlier work, and the pieces of memoir, which come along unexpectedly in various chapters, enrich the author’s themes. 

A couple of pages very meaningful to me personally had to do with writing when we are sad. She cites the work of Texas social psychologist James Pennebaker, who stumbled on something when he was suffering from depression and began writing down “the contents of his heart,” as Cain puts it. 

…And he noticed that the more he wrote, the better he felt. He opened up to his wife again [he had been drinking; they had been fighting], and to his work. His depression lifted.

The psychologist went on to make the phenomenon he experienced the basis for decades of study. He asked groups of people to write about their personal troubles, directing others to write about mundane facts in their lives.

Pennebaker found that the people who wrote about their troubles were markedly calmer and happier than those who described their sneakers. Even months later, they were physically healthier, with lower blood pressure and fewer doctor’s visits. They had better relationships and more success at work. 

Those who did the exercise of “expressive writing,” Cain reports from Pennebaker’s work, were not wallowing in their troubles but deriving insight from confronting and facing their pain.

P.S. 2/16/2023: Oprah picked this book! It's her 99th Book Club pick!

A couple weeks ago, before I’d even seen this book, I sat down to write a long letter. (I write letters, as well as blog posts, but letters I write by hand, on paper, with pen.) I began writing in a rather “pitiful” state of mind, going on and on about my reasons for feeling blue, somewhat as I admitted in my post the other day to feeling “crabby” but with a lot more honesty. By the last page of my letter, though, as I noted before the closing line, I had written myself into a cheerful frame of mind! I’ve noticed before, more than once when drafting blog posts, that I often sit down feeling sad and then somehow write myself into gratitude.

Writing isn’t a silver bullet or a magic potion and doesn’t always banish the blues. And they do come back. But that’s life: sometimes it’s an emotional rainy day, and then the sun shines again, and predicting how we’ll feel on any given future day is never foolproof. But if, as another friend says of me, I am a graphomaniac, I guess that’s one more thing to be thankful for in my life, because now and again writing gets me out of some dark places and back into the light.

You’re Not Getting a Complete Picture

The other morning I had an e-mail from a reader of this blog that read, “Pamela, I have just read yesterday's blog. Your dedication to loving life inspires the same in me!”

I do love life. Indeed, what else is there? Everything else for the human species — love, honor, integrity, good deeds, art literature, our very appreciation of beauty in the natural world — depends on our being alive and receptive and responsive. At the same time, we all need reminders of the wonder of life, such as this one I found in the words of a Western painter:

...You’re a little biological entity that has some very miraculous sensory organs, and you have a brain so you can organize it and understand it partially. And you’re fragile. You live a very short time in a hostile, and yet friendly, universe because you evolved in the ecology in which you live. And you can either shrink from the world in fright and try to avoid the reality of your perishability and sense of being no more, or you can throw yourself into it and say it’s an adventure. And I’m going to drink it to the full and experience what I can and record what I can, and distill and understand what I can. 

- Wilson Hurley, painter, in an interview, in WILSON HURLEY: A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION

Reader, thank you for your message and for the subject heading you gave it: “Grateful.” I am grateful for your words of encouragement! It helps to know that anything I’ve written was able to help someone else! 

Look for the singing bird

The truth is, though, that I do not put my whole life online in this blog (or anywhere else), and if you think I don’t have dark nights of the soul, you would be very mistaken. Sometimes (though these have been uncommon lately, I’m happy to say) I even have dark days of the soul. Thinking that warm spring days had arrived, for example, I found it difficult to be plunged back once more into freezing nights and winter-cold days filled with bitter, relentless wind — and the coincidence of learning, as another overcast morning dawned, seeming to dawn with grudging reluctance, learning that same morning that someone I had believed was dedicated to the betterment of the world and the downtrodden is working instead with very different aims than those he states publicly — well, that coincidence brought me very low, very low indeed. And even on the best of days, a dark current often runs intermittently beneath and behind the brightness, because the general direction of our government these days and of world governments and societies in general is not one I can see as “bending toward justice” or likely to create a better life for future generations. 

It is not disagreement, as such, that weighs heavily on my heart but the hatred and vitriol that too often accompany it. Why should other Americans brand me an enemy because our beliefs about the country’s good differ? Was one bloody Civil War not enough? This hatred makes my heart heavy. The wise counsel dialogue, and I have tried to initiate dialogue — on violence and on partisan politics, attempting to allow myself to be vulnerable in hopes that those who see me wrong would not see me as an enemy but as someone with whom they could share not only their views and beliefs but also their reasons and feelings. What I got back, other than encouragement from friends already in agreement with me, was a resounding silence.

So if you see me as flying above political tumult and dwelling in another, simpler, more lighthearted reality than anyone else, you see a partial picture at best! Should I correct my presentation of self by including pessimistic gloom, despair, and nightmares in these posts? And if I’m not going to do that, why even mention the bleak side of my mind and heart today?

Little tree of thorns

Thorns, yes

But it is also full of life

I asked a friend, a writer and artist, how she managed to maintain her sunny, upbeat attitude in today’s difficult national climate. I wish I could remember precisely her response, but it went something like this: “I’m trying to lead with my strength.” Happiness was not her only emotional state, you see, but the one she chose to share with others. She chooses, continually, to share her strength, rather than her weakness.

Painter Wilson Hurley was not unaware of his own “perishability” but chose not to dwell on that and live in fear. Neither am I unaware nor unaffected by the ills of the world and the horrors perpetrated by mankind, but I refuse to let that aspect of reality blind me to the wonders of life and the world, which are equally real. (Besides, as I say, my attempts to invite dialogue on the sorrow and anger infecting us all went nowhere, and beating a dead horse is the last ploy of the defeated.)

“Il faut lutter,” my friend Hélène wrote to me long ago. “Il faut se blinder contra la vie.” She had lived through war, had lost her husband to other women (not one but many), had no children or any other living relatives, and her old age was spent in poverty, every day a struggle — but she never, even while retaining a sharp mind and keen awareness of world events, never lost her charming, childlike joy in pleasures that required no expenditure of money: the song of a bird, a letter from a friend, sunshine through her window falling on her “little garden” of potted herbs. These were her armor, talismans in the struggle not to lose her love of life. She was really not barricading herself against life, you see, but only against life’s sorrows, and she used life’s joys for her barricade. Even that doesn’t fully capture it. Rather, the joy in a bird’s song for a while took precedence over any other thought or sensation. My friend was not hiding from reality behind a barricade of birdsong, because the singing of the bird was as real as anything else and worthy of attention. 

What brings us joy is as worthy of attention as the flaws of the world we would mend if we could. Is that better? We will be here only a short time, and each of us has a different way we can help others. Sharing joy can be one of those ways, as my American artist-writer friend and my Parisian friend Hélène showed me. 

So I am not going to delve publicly into my fears and sorrows here on “Books in Northport” and only bring them up at all to say to anyone else who feels sad or fearful or pessimistic or hopeless, today or any other day or night: You probably feel alone, but you are not the only one. To be alive, to be human, is to struggle.

But where do you, where might you, find joy? What do you, might you, love? This winter I find my bliss in the sublime indifference of mountains and desert I love more each day, as well as in the companionship of my husband and our dog and our neighbors. Also in the peaceful nearness of cattle and horses. The occasional butterfly on a warm day. And all these are real aspects of the real world.

Passing through

What the future holds, none of us knows. We are passing through life, and all we have is today. For now I am here. And so, if I can share even the smallest quotient of my happiness or maybe “inspire” someone else to find it wherever he or she may, please consider these seasonal retirement postings as my “mite” for the collection plate. For now, it is what I have to give. On my good days. And if you want something cheerier from me today, go back to March 28, 2015. The sun sets, the sun rises. 

Sunrise

I Turn to My Readers for Suggestions

No one seeks out depression, especially in the springtime, when our world seems at last to be coming back to life after its long, cold sleep. But depression doesn’t need to be sought: no, it comes unbidden and unwelcome. And making it go away again can be extremely difficult. I’ve been thinking about this because people important to me struggle with the problem. Maybe you do, too, or someone you know does. Is there anything we can do to help?

One of my natural first thoughts was to survey books on the topic, but that’s not as easy as one might think, either. The authors of one site I found had done the same thing and concluded:

On [sic] the main ... we are disappointed with the majority of books on depression. They fail to distinguish between the different types of depression. They waste valuable space debating whether depression is a "disease" like diabetes or a problem of adaptation and poor coping skills. For us, the answer is that depression is a syndrome, with many different causes and solutions.

Well, fine, but then I looked at their list of books and found myself still disappointed. What I really want to do is throw the question “out there” and ask you: 

Is there some particular book on depression and/or bipolar disorder that you have found especially informative and/or helpful? 

You needn’t be depressed to weigh in on this question, and you can register your comment as “Anonymous” or even send it to me in e-mail, if you’d like.

Here’s another question: 

If you are sometimes depressed, is there anything you would like friends to ask or say to you during those times?

As for me, here’s what (little) I know from my own experience:

1)  Depression is not “feeling sorry for yourself.” If a depressed person could “snap out of it,” he or she surely would. In fact, the burden of what I think of as meta-depression can exacerbate the problem, as a thoughtful person compares his or her life and problems to those of others and thinks, “I shouldn’t be depressed.” Depression is not a matter of should or shouldn’t.

2)  Neither is it true that “everything is relative” because all personal experience is absolute. We can observe other people living their lives, but the only one any of us lives is our own. The only life any of us knows “from the inside” is our own.

3)  Depression is not “all in your head.” Depression is an overwhelmingly physiological experience, as much as a state of mind. During the winter of my worst and longest depression, I could only sleep two to three hours a night and would awake feeling encased in a suit of dread from head to toe. Every day and every night were draining and exhausting.

4)  There is a lot a depressed person can do to try to push depression away, but no cure is guaranteed to work. Exercise can help. (I forced myself to go to the pool three mornings a week.) A cheery environment can help. (I repainted a dull beige room a light, sunny yellow.) It’s a good idea to see a doctor. (I did.) Prescription medication helps some people. (I tried it for a while.) “Getting out of the house,” yoga, meditation – all are good ideas. Talking can help. But nothing is a guaranteed, instantaneous cure.

5)   You cannot assume that someone who continues to be depressed is “not trying” to feel better. You may have no idea how hard that person is trying or how many things he or she has tried and is continuing to practice. Second-guessing and guilt-tripping a depressed person for being depressed is no help at all.

I’ve numbered these as if they are separate “points,” but it should be clear that they are all interrelated.

A big problem with Internet “research” is that so much of what turns up in search results comes from people with something to sell, whether it’s a book or a pill or a program. When I remembered that NIH is my go-to for general health questions (thus avoiding sites focused on sales), I turned to NIMH to see what they had to say about depression, and right away I found it more helpful:

Most likely, depression is caused by a combination of genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological factors. 

Depressive illnesses are disorders of the brain. Brain-imaging technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), have shown that the brains of people who have depression look different than those of people without depression. The parts of the brain involved in mood, thinking, sleep, appetite, and behavior appear different. But these images do not reveal why the depression has occurred [emphasis added]. They also cannot be used to diagnose depression.

 To me this is helpful not because it claims to have all the answers but for the clear statement that answers are elusive. The brain of a depressed person looks different, but the difference does not reveal the cause. Is it situational? Chemical? A symptom of some other illness? Brain image can’t show answers to these questions.

Every generation, it seems, has its popular answers, but there is still so much we don’t know.