000412B, a photo by Lateral Support on Flickr.
p. 154
'Despair is, in a way, an appropriate response to the world; how else to face the corrosive power of time, how else to accommodate the brevity and frailty of the self?
Life without an element of despair in it would seem an empty enterprise, a shallow little song-and-dance on the surface of experience. Despair has about it a bracing sense of actuality. Emily Dickinson says, darkly:
I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true -
...
But despair and depression, of course, are not the same thing.
Depression is nearly always the consequence of despair, a despair one cannot feel one's way through in order to emerge from the other side, a despair that will not be moved.
Sometimes such pain - perhaps especially when it has been known for a long time, and all one's resources are used up, depleted - takes hold in the self; it becomes the climate in which we operate, a daily weather.
Depression - simply the state of being exhausted by despair? - takes up residence in the desk drawer, the pile of shoes at the bottom of the closet, last night's unwashed dishes tumbled in the sink.
Despair is sharp, definite, forceful; it is a respose to experience.
Depression accumulates, pools, sighs, settles in; it is the absence of a response. It does not makes things move. Consider our tropes for it: a cloud, a shadow, a weight. It lingers, broods, sits heavily; it replaces the sharpness of grief (which no one can bear to feel for very long) with the muffling emptiness of fog.'
Mark Doty
