Posted by fachad on February 8, 2003, at 23:53:38
This is picking up a thread over on the med board:
http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030130/msgs/138954.html
on anhedonia.
I have come across a few really good descriptions of anhedonia in literature. One that really resonated with my experience was from H.P. Lovecraft's "The Silver Key". Here is a snippet from that story. The full story is available at
http://www.gizmology.net/lovecraft/works/silverkey.htm
The Silver Key
"When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt those liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether..."
"He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies."
"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions."
"Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness."
Does this resonate with anyone else's experience? Has anyone else found things in literature that express their experience of depression?
poster:fachad
thread:36701
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20030208/msgs/36701.html