tagged once more--likely more than required

I've been tagged again, this time by Jessie.

The deal is, I'm supposed to pick up the nearest book, turn to page 123, line 5 and type it on my blog.

Line 5, page 123 says: "Or could it be that a vague dissatisfaction with the way in which my work was going--the onset of inertia which has possessed me time and time again during my writing life, and made me crabbed and discontented--had also haunted me more fiercely during that period than ever, somehow magnifying the difficulty with alcohol?" Or, if I don't count the half sentence at the top of the page, line five is simply: "Unresolvable questions, perhaps."

The book I have been reading and marking up of late is called, "Unholy Ghost, writers on depression". It is a collection of essays written by writers who have either experienced depression firsthand or have a close relative who lives with depression. As I read each of the essays, my thoughts about those written by the relatives were that they just didn't get it. Whereas the ones written by people who live with depression seemed right on. Easy to relate to and understand.

Probably my favorite essay right now was written by William Styron in 1985, as part of his book, Darkness Visible. These are some of my favorite words by him:

"As one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation. Brainstorm, for instance... Told that someone's mood disorder has evolved into a storm--a veritable howling tempest in the brain...even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that 'depression' evokes, something akin to 'So what?' or 'You'll pull out of it' or 'We all have bad days."

and this:

"I shall never learn what 'caused' my depression, as no one will ever learn about their own...Plainly multiple components are involved...That is why the greatest fallacy about suicide lies in the belief that there is a single immediate answer--or perhaps combined answers--as to why the deed was done. The inevitable question 'Why did he [or she] do it?' usually leads to odd speculations, for the most part fallacies themselves...To discover why some people plunge into the downward spiral of depression, one must search beyond the manifest crisis--and then still fail to come up with anything beyond wise conjecture."

He discusses the connection between melancholia (the term he uses to describe depression that I find somehow comforting) and hypochondria:

"It is easy to see how this condition is part of the psyche's apparatus of defense: unwilling to accept its own gathering deterioration, the mind announces to its indwelling consciousness that it is the body with its perhaps correctable defects--not the precious and irreplaceable mind--that is going haywire."

And finally, some of his descriptive phrases about depression:

"...ensnared me in a suffocating gloom...I felt an immense and aching solitude...the muddied thought processes register the distress of an organ in convulsion...I have felt the wind of the wing of madness..."

Possibly some of the most comforting words are these:

"It is of great importance that those who are suffering a siege, perhaps for the first time, be told--be convinced, rather--that the illness will run its course and they will pull through. A tough job, this; calling 'Chin up!' from the safety of the shore to a drowning person is tantamount to insult, but it has been shown over and over again that if the encouragement is dogged enough--and the support equally committed and passionate--the endangered one can nearly always be saved."

He's right, you know.