Blogotional

I mentioned that I am reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky at the moment. Adrian Warnock today links to a Malcolm Muggeridge book that lists good 'ol Fyodor as one of the more influential Christian figures of late. As I was reading C and P today, I ran across a passage that is the best description of being in a depressive state I have ever read:

A strange time came for Raskolnikov; it was as if fog suddenly fell around him and confined him in a hopeless and heavy solitude. Recalling this time later, long afterwards, he suspected that his consciousness had sometimes grown dim, as it were, and that this had continued, with some intervals, until the final catastrophe. He was positively convinced that he had been mistaken about many things then; for example, the times and periods of certain events. At least, remembering afterwards, and trying to figure out what he remembered, he learned much about himself, going by information he received from others. He would, for example, confuse one event with another; he would consider something to be the consequence of an event that existed only in his imagination. At times he was overcome by a morbidly painful anxiety, which would even turn into panic fear. But he also remembered that he would have moments, hours, and perhaps even days, full of apathy, which came over him as if in opposition to his former fear—an apathy resembling the morbidly indifferent state of some dying people. Generally, during those last days, he even tried, as it were, to flee from a clear and full understanding of his situation; some essential facts, which called for an immediate explanation, especially burdened him; but how glad he would have been to free himself, to flee from certain cares, to forget which, however, would in his situation have threatened complete and inevitable ruin.

I am more of an essay and non-fiction man than a literature man. When I read fiction, it is for plots and action, not insight (i.e. Tom Clancy - Yes!, Ann Tyler - not so yes) But every now and then a passage like this jumps out and gives me an insight into myself and humanity that I might not otherwise have gotten. I have never done what Raskolnikov did, but I have certainly felt almost exactly like that passage describes.

And while we are on the subject of book passages I can relate to...

Some time back, I am reading The Last Lion by William Manchester, A Winston Churchill biography -- probably the best. I ran into a passage that I have permanently kept because I think it describes me and it does my ego well to think that Wisnton Churchill and I were alike. The passage described Churchill's reaction to his time in POW camp as a young man during the Boer Wars.

Winston’s response to imprisonment tells a great deal about him. He felt disgust, despair, rage. This is not a universal reaction to restraint. Many public men have adjusted to it without great difficulty; it has served as a temporary refuge for them, a place for reflection, study, and writing. Mohandas Gandhi, now toiling in South Africa as a leader of Indian stretcher-bearers, would later flourish in British prisons. But not Churchill. He found, he wrote, ‘no comfort in any of the philosophical ideas which some men parade in their hours of ease and strength and safety.’ His wrath and tremendous frustration probably arose from his depressive nature. He needed outer stimuli, the chances for excitement and achievement which were his lifelong defences against melancholia. The prisoner-of-war camp was like being back in the harness of school. It was worse; their long tin POW dormitory was enclosed by a ten-foot corrugated iron fence rimmed by barbed wire, watched by armed guards fifty yards apart, and brilliantly illuminated at night by searchlights on tall standards. Elsewhere the war continued, great events were in progress, but here he was penned in, entirely in the power of the Boers. He owed his life to their mercy, his daily bread to their compassion, his move¬ments to their indulgence. In this atmosphere he found himself picking quarrels with other British officer inmates over trivial matters — he couldn’t tolerate their whistling— and took no pleasure from their company. He felt, he wrote, ‘webbed about with a tangle of regulations and restrictions. I certainly hated every minute of my captivity more than I have ever hated any other period in my whole life.�