Tristesse
Peter “Listening to Prozac” Kramer has a new book out, which is excerpted in the NYT Magazine. He talks about depression as disease, pure and simple, perhaps chronic, sometimes fatal, but without spiritual, artistic, or moral overtones. Familiar stuff to anyone who frequents the NYT, they print so much stuff on depression that I’m seriously concerned about the mental health of their editors.
I was recently asked if I was depressed. And it’s true, in the past week or two I have found myself with an unexplained ineffable melancholy, a tristesse, suffusing my thoughts and feelings. It’s moderate, seems most prominent midmorning and midevening, does not interfere with work or home, and wouldn’t seem to require clinical intervention. Ignore it then. Still, it’s odd.
I think I’ve figured it out, though. I’ve been riding my bike to work, ripping along without adequate eye protection. My eyes protect themselves from the wind by watering. So, every day, I arrive at work and return home again having essentially cried lightly for half an hour. And somewhere in the bowels of my brain an ancient circuit tries to account for this purely physical phenomenon by providing a post-hoc emotional explanation, and getting the arrow of causation wrong. Actions define attitudes, as every first year social psych student knows.