IN PRAISE OF THE CRACK-UP by Jeanette Winterson [WSJ 17 OCTOBER 2009]“The life plans, guru weekends, self-help manuals, get rich/thin/happy programs are no different than upgrading the car/house/job/wife/boyfriend ethos that confuses surface activity with change.
“Art isn't a surface activity. It comes from a deep place and it meets the wound we each carry.
“Even when our lives are going well, there is something that prowls the borders, unseen, unfelt….Existential depression….experienced as loss of meaning, a kind of empty bafflement, is different from the situational depression….Job loss, bereavement and catastrophe will throw us into situational depression, but existential depression is different. When life loses all meaning, we cannot live. The German novelist Hermann Hesse wrote of suicide as a state of mind—that many people who are nominally alive have in fact already committed suicide.”
No comments:
Post a Comment