other people's thoughts

Just a few things on depression and melancholy... by other people, have heard from other sources such as new Scientist about depressive realism.....

Depressive realism. It has been documented that depressive people have a more accurate conception than do optimists of their abilities and limits. The depressive possesses a clarity which can’t be clouded by comforting lies. It may be that strenuous ‘positive thinking’ has a beneficial effect on the immune system and your earning capacity but what’s the point of being well if It’s based on an illusion? Besides, such aerobics of the morale are exhausting.
Your positive thinker may do well in suburbia but I’d rather be with a lucid depressive in the Arctic, where survival depends on precision and not fooling yourself about your chances on the ice.
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Cognitive therapists focus on getting patients to see the glass as half-full rather than half empty. Being positive has become rather a fetish. A more radical tactic would be to abolish the need for evaluation at all and just accept the glass as it is, whether it be cracked or brimming.
Gwyneth Lewis, Sunbathing in the Rain

Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you?
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet tr. Joan M. Burnham

Solitude - Rainer Maria Rilke

from Letters to a Young Poet trans. Steven Mitchell

And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognise that we are alone; yes, even begin from this realisation. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. he would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures change for the person for the person who becomes so literary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountain top, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.


and I shall add: but humans need other humans, solitude and being independent: without need of others are not quite the same....I go back to 'companions in lonliness' mentioned elsewhere here...accepting our solitude doesn't mean we cannot accept, indeed do not need, companionship and the hospitality of others, from the stranger to the lover. And of course we can offer it: even if for just 5 minutes to a stranger whom we will never see again.