Styron: "So Alien to Everyday Experience"

I have all but given up the thought that I should sleep in a reasonable pattern. Whatever effect Epilim still has on me, I just try to devote myself to reading in bed. In a few hours, sleep may or may not come. Last night, I started William Styron’s “Darkness Visible.” I simply couldn’t wait, though I have yet to finish “Power and Interdependence” and “Between Peace and War.”

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“[Failure] of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases.” (p. 10)

“As a clinician in the field told me honestly and, I think, with a striking deftness of analogy: ‘If you compare our knowledge [of depression] with Columbus’s discovery of America, America is yet unknown; we are still down on that little island in the Bahamas.’” (p. 11)

“That the word ‘indescribable’ should present itself is not fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience… William James [a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher (1842-1910)], who battled depression for many years, gave up the search for an adequate portrayal, implying its near-impossibility when he wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience: ‘It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.’” (pp. 16-17)

“The pain persisted during my museum tour and reached a crescendo in the next few hours when, back at the hotel, I fell onto the bed and lay gazing at the ceiling, nearly immobilized and in a trance of supreme discomfort. Rational thought was usually absent from my mind at such times, hence trance. I can think of no more apposite word for this state of being, a condition of helpless stupor in which cognition was replaced by that ‘positive and active anguish.’” (pp. 17-18)

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And the story of Albert Camus. And the tragedy of the former wife of Romain Gary, Jean Seberg, an actress, in 1979 and a year later Gray himself…

Camus wrote in “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

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Now Lebow’s “Between Peace and War” is telling me about the 1962 Sino-Indian War. According to Judith M. Brown, Nehru got totally caught off guard by the Chinese attack, despite of the forward policy. When he visited Beijing before the war broke out, Nehru pointed out to Premier Chou En Lai that some Chinese maps included Indian territories as Chinese. Chou told him that they were just old maps and they didn’t have enough time to amend them. So, my impression was the cunning Chou betrayed the trust Nehru had towards China, and Chou personally.

However, Lebow cites an important factor that contributed to the lack of preparedness on the part of India, which is that Nehru and especially Krishna Menon promoted politicisation of the military, thus surrounding themselves by sycophants. Brown does mention the obnoxious character of Menon and insufficient nature of information gathered by the Indian Embassy in Beijing. But she omits the sorry state of the Indian military.