The depression

The depression that resulted from trying to confront the issue of the human condition ultimately made resignation unavoidable for practically all young adolescents. So deep and dark was the depression that individuals, after resigning, made a silent agreement never to again allow themselves to recall the experience or the depressing states, truths and issues that caused it.

Depression was the main feature of resignation. Indeed, while humans do not normally acknowledge it, depression, or the blues, melancholia, the sickness unto death or the noonday demon, as it has variously been termed, has been one of the main ailments of human life for the past 2 million years.

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Print Edition Depression is the darkest of human states and as such it is extremely rare to find such an honest description of it as occurs in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, No Worst There is None. The poem was written in the late 1800s in what is now archaic English, but there is no doubting what Hopkins is talking about: ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief / More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring / Comforter, where, where is your comforting? / Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? / My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief / Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing— / Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked “No ling- / ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief” / O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May [any] who ne’er [have never] hung there. Nor does long our small / Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep / Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all / Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.’ The word ‘hung’ is the perfect word for depression, for the state that there is ‘no worse’ than.

In The Moral Intelligence of Children, Pulitzer prize-winning author Robert Coles provides a remarkably honest description of the agony of resignation and the difficulty adults have had in helping adolescents during this period. He wrote: ‘I tell of the loneliness many young people feel, even if they have a good number of friends…It’s a loneliness that has to do with a self-imposed judgment of sorts: I am pushed and pulled by an array of urges, yearnings, worries, fears, that I can’t share with anyone, really…This sense of utter difference…makes for a certain moodiness well known among adolescents, who are, after all, constantly trying to figure out exactly how they ought to and might live…I remember…a young man of fifteen who engaged in light banter, only to shut down, shake his head, refuse to talk at all when his own life and troubles became the subject at hand. He had stopped going to school, begun using large amounts of pot; he sat in his room for hours listening to rock music, the door closed. To myself I called him a host of psychiatric names: withdrawn, depressed, possibly psychotic; finally I asked him about his head-shaking behavior: I wondered whom he was thereby addressing. He replied: “No one.” I hesitated, gulped a bit as I took a chance: “Not yourself?” He looked right at me now in a sustained stare, for the first time. “Why do you say that?”…I decided not to answer the question in the manner that I was trained to reply…an account of what I had surmised about him, what I thought was happening inside him…Instead, with some unease…I heard myself saying this: “I’ve been there; I remember being there—remember when I felt I couldn’t say a word to anyone”…I can still remember those words, still Page 208 of
Print Edition remember feeling that I ought not have spoken them: it was a breach in “technique.” The young man kept staring at me, didn’t speak, at least with his mouth. When he took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, I realized they had begun to fill’ (1996, pp.143–144 of 218).

When Coles says that ‘I heard myself saying this: I’ve been there; I remember being there’, and that that acknowledgment was ‘a breach in technique’, he is acknowledging that resignation has been something so dark humans have had to forget it, and indeed it has been something they have had a responsibility to forget if they were to effectively delude themselves that there was not another condemning ideal world.

The phrase ‘I’ve been there’ is also used by the Australian poet Henry Lawson in his 1897 poem, The Voice from Over Yonder, which is about the depression that results from trying to think about why human life is at odds with the Godly, cooperative ideals of life: ‘Say it! think it, if you dare! / Have you ever thought or wondered / Why the Man and God were sundered? / Do you think the Maker blundered?’ / And the voice in mocking accents, answered only: “I’ve been there.”’ The unsaid words in this final phrase are, ‘and I’m not going there again’; the ‘there’ and the ‘over yonder’ of the title being the state of depression.