Descent Read Online Free

merging right with philosophy, left with psychology and alternative medicine, and down with mysticism and the Gnostic occult—I stood in front of them in the recognition that depression is a consumer mode, too (thoughts in this vein, so prelapsarian, embracing the world outside my spell, were like Morse code messages from my old self). I also discovered here the Brown study’s mad half, because in every other book these scribblers acknowledged the hell that had forced me to them. Here were my comrades, redeemed or rehabilitated, from suffering ascended to the heights of clear vision and quality hardback publication, and since I’d lost all power of literary discernment, I perused a lot of them with greedy intensity, mustering none of my former cynicism for the inward journey and mind work.
    I also took aim at some legitimate heavies, spending myself against William James (whose depression was famously the bona fide version), Kierkegaard (ditto), Marcus Aurelius, Saint Augustine, and Jung. But reading while depressed is not really reading, and I cycled as I turned these hallowed pages between hope for an epiphanic enlightenment and dread that there was nothing to be taken from them beyond confirmation of my current metaphysic. And confirmed I was. Aurelius’s stoicism seemed thinly transparent, Augustine’s redemption was a self-imposed ruse, Jung’s mysticism was a house of cards—in short, the deep thinkers were right to be unconsoled, the bitterness of pessimists was the only true vision, the highest truth was dark. Tolstoy, nearing fifty, reached an impasse I recognized:
I questioned painfully and protractedly, and with no idle curiosity.… I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself—and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing that was leading me to despair—the meaningless absurdity of life—is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.
    But my biggest mistake, by far, was Ernest Becker, whose The Denial of Death should only be read by those well-dosed with Wellbutrin or otherwise immune from the psychic torture in its pages. Becker’s scholarly and exhaustive contention is that the depressed penetrate to a rational mortal fear, while the rest of us—my undepressed self included—devise elaborate and neurotic identities to drown out death’s deafening scream. Heroism in particular is undressed in this fashion—we each construct our myth as a shield, our ego as an atmosphere, argues Becker, lest mortality descend entirely on us, and not just in our spare bad moments, to drive us away from sanity.
    Could I ever go back to my pre-Becker days? I’d read him twenty-five years before and passed the interim immoderately happy, but these were facts I dispensed with conveniently; depressed, I read Becker and emerged deeply panicked and possessed of a truth best framed as a question: Why isn’t everyone depressed?
    Spurred to it by madness, I’d eaten from the tree of knowledge, and now there was no return from exile.
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    It was a relief to me daily when my family left the house. This is an especially bleak state of affairs—preferring to endure one’s suffering in solitude, and finding the presence of those one loves unbearably difficult and demanding. It’s a loneliness not exactly volitional, but neither is it unwelcomed or contested; on the contrary, the depressed person feels in utter aloneness a strange and appropriate consolation. My preference was to squeeze my head beneath my pillow; despite this, and in the name of my children, I struggled against my inclination to disappear completely. Mounting what felt like a colossal effort, and marshaling some shadow of my former energies, I made a dutiful appearance each morning to feed the dogs and light the fire, take a nodding interest in