Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

See if you can identify the word I didn't know in this sentence: "The personality might slowly elide until it is no longer recognizable or regainable as itself; it may cease to be the personality that goes with a particular self." (Larry McMurtry, from Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, in "Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression," by Nell Casey)


elide: to omit, or suppress; to merge, as in "whole periods are elided into mere seconds on the silver screen;" from the Latin for "strike out"


McMurtry's essay explores self-hood after a quad bypass. It's frightening, yet puts words to things I have always wondered about (anaesthesia, major surgery, and the emotional/spiritual effects). The book is a collection of essays by writers on depression, and as morbid as it sounds, it's very well-written and engaging.


The book only confirms my private opinion: all writers suffer what I call "Virginia Woolf days": days when you feel those dark voices nibbling along the edges of your mind, when the clouds press down on your shoulders, when all you can see before you is a calendar list of like days and your mind simply refuses to open up enough to consider the possibility of sunshine. Woolf filled her pockets with stones, walked to the river's edge, removed her shoes, left her stick in the grass, and walked into the river. Her letter to her husband is a beautiful, bitter-sweet testament of their marriage, his courage, and her sensitivity:

Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

On that note, I'm going to look at some LOLCatz...