Horrors of the mind

Are books meant to make us feel good? Are they meant to make us cheerful? I don’t think so. Not always.

Books are meant to make us feel awed and humbled. The pleasure they provide – the pleasure of the mind, the joy of seeing worlds created by words – is undimmed even if they are about catastrophic subjects, even if they are nihilistic in their approach or end in tragedy or are untouched by redemption.

Is Anna Karenina a very happy novel? Is Madame Bovary? Are the novels by Richard Yates?

I thought of all this again on reading in one breathless sitting the great American writer William Styron’s memoir of madness. Read the New York Times review here.

In the 1980s, Styron suffered from clinical depression. It was a debilitating malaise that turned him into a wretched, broken, suicidal man.

“Depression,” Styron tells us in the opening pages of this slim, harrowing book, “is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self – to the mediating intellect – as to verge close to being beyond description.”

He does a remarkable job of putting into words the ineffable, of showing how the “gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain”: the slow disintegration of the mind, the parallel shutting down of the body, the medication, the tendencies of self-destruction, the unremitting gloom.

In the end, Styron – a peer of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal – did emerge from his depression. But this memoir remained his last major book, an afterword, as Karl Miller wrote in the London Review of Books, to “his novels, with their stress on suicide and gloom”.

You yourself are responsible for your deeds

Till I was 13 I was blissfully ignorant about it. At 17, I had no little or no semblance of it. 21 was when it was fashionable to shirk it. Now, at 24, I don’t know how to deal with it. I’m talking about that 14-letter word that fills every newly inducted adult with a sense of excruciating dread - responsibility.

Ah, those simpler times when responsibility meant doing your homework fast enough so you could play hopscotch with the neighbours. Oh, that period of carefree abandon when being irresponsible only meant submitting college projects a week late and inventing creative excuses to cover it up. Alas, no longer can we protect ourselves in the shroud of youth. Responsibility has risen from its murky depths to rear its ugly head and lock horns with it’s arch nemesis - the hapless young adult.

Now we have things like jobs and stuff; heck, we even have a savings account. Taxes to pay crying out loud. No longer do we have gullible professors to answer to; we have hardnosed bosses who see right through the oft foolproof “I have viral flu.” Even those kindly parents, who once cleaned our poop without a murmur of protest, shriek if we so much as leave a few clothes lying around the house. Some of us are even have spouses - now that’s a whole new level of shit-hitting-the-fan-responsibility.

I think of myself as a fairly responsible person, well, at least amongst my four friends who share the tenacity of being irresponsible. One has a habit of mysteriously losing large wads of cash; another has made it a point to lose every cell phone she ever owned. One bunks office at an alarming frequency and another has a prized collection of overdue bills. So, being the “responsible one” out of the four of us is not something I’m particularly proud of.

I’ve often heard people saying that as you grow older, a sense of responsibility comes naturally. Yes, a sense of responsibility does strike but naturally it does not. It’s like fat ankles - you’re stuck with them, you crib about them, but there’s nothing you can do about them.

It’s overwhelming to think of all things I’m responsible for - my career, my money, my parents, my marriage, my future, my life, myself. At times, I’m in denial. I run and duck for cover when I see responsibility lurking. I can run, but for how long I hide?

I wonder and perhaps the 30-aboves can help me with this - do we fear responsibility more or less as we grow older? Is it something we just get over like first crushes? Does it become second nature or does it forever loom like a hydra-headed monster?

Adultescents

So I thought I’d write a blog on my quarter life crisis because it sounded kind of depressingly cool to suffer from a quarter life crisis. Yes, I’m shallow like that. Besides, I didn’t have anything interesting to say about anything else. I first heard the term being used by my classmate in our second year of graduation. He was three years older to us and used to spout Tarantino dialogues while conversing. (So clearly he was going through a quarter life crisis.) At the time, I thought he made up the phrase and I was real impressed until a year later when I realised that everything he said had already been said by someone famous.

Turns out, this quarter life crisis business is serious stuff. It’s not just another twenty-something fad like drinking wine and eating cheese together or watching foreign films that you only half-understand and then pretend to love. A cursory Google search revealed websites, books, medical research, tutorials and of course several thousand other blogs devoted to this phenomenon that I so casually tossed around as fodder for my blog.

Several other people have written realms about this predicament and have described it far better than I ever could. Sample this blog post on Healthy Living – It’s a “sudden reality check where we overanalyze our current lifestyles in comparison to the lifestyles of our peers. For others it’s about doubt – always wondering if I’m making the right decisions. You wake up one day without parents or schools to point out your next step. Some of us are thrown expectations of adults but are still treated like children, and some claim to go to sleep most nights overwhelmed, constantly settling for safety, and wishing on the lottery instead of getting out there and chasing after all those big, bright dreams. Others are just trying to find the right balance between life, work, love.”

So here’s my take on the QLC: “The QLC is suffered by one who just cant be sensible enough to face the adult life without constant self-introspection and self-doubt and is either too stupid or too pathetic to just suck it all up and get over oneself. Also thinks of it as something that is depressingly cool and then goes on to write a blog about it.” Yeah, sounds about right.