Chapter One: Ecstatic Journeys
The discovery of the worm in the apple of my existence led, as I said, to my waking up, a heightened savoring of life. And I felt driven to discover something More, something Greater. The discovery of my mortality jolted me to seek enlightenment, to explore the mysteries it also threw a long shadow on my world. A shadow of "black bile," of
melancholy the old term for that ill humored state that nowadays we call depression.
It's hard to say just how many people suffer from depression. There are all kinds and grades of this affliction, running from occasional bouts of feeling "down in the dumps" to serious clinical depression and all the way to the kind of suicidal madness of depression described so graphically by William Styron in his memoir
Darkness Visible. The causes of depression, no doubt many, are still hard to pinpoint in any one case, and Styron finds something disturbingly mysterio ...
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