Standing with Dr. Proudie

Living in Puerto Rico, it didn’t seem surprising that I knew someone who knew Andrew Solomon, since everybody on the island knows everybody else. Still, why should I have run into someone who not only knew Solomon, but had been to his wedding at Althorp, the family home of the Spencers, of which Diana, Princess of Wales, was one?

The guy explained—they were childhood friends, since Solomon’s father had been head of a pharmaceutical here on the island. And so they had remained friends, though Solomon had attended Yale and later Jesus College, Cambridge. Solomon’s story had similarities to my own: we’re both gay, we’re both depressives, he had written a book about the planned death of his mother, and I had written a book about my mother’s life and, especially, death.

More, his book on depression was titled The Noonday Demon: an Atlas of Depression, which was a phrase I had encountered when reading up on acedia. So I had contemplated reading the book, but decided no; it was too recent, you see, my own last bitter bout with the disease.

But I’ve returned, over time, to consider the disease, or the condition, or perhaps just the mindset of depression. And the fact that I can write that depression may be a quality or state of mind indicates how tricky, how elusive, depression can be.

Because Solomon is right—in some ways the world of depression seems like the real world. Really, is there any sense cleaning your house? It’s just going to get dirty again, as will your body, so showering is out, and eating? You’d have to open that refrigerator and get a nose-full of all that rotting food you’ve not had the energy to throw out, and besides, getting out of the chair? Too much work….

Following this logic leads to tumbling down the very slippery slope that ends up—as it did to Solomon—with his lying in bed, unable to get up, and unable to extend his arm for four hours.

As Solomon remarks in the clip below, depressives in some ways see the world more clearly. Most people, for example, overestimate their abilities, and certainly most people underestimate the amount of time and trouble that things will take. And that was one of the problems you had—or at least I had—in the university. Of course I can research and write a fifty-page term paper the day before it’s due! Hey, no problem!

And so the cheery optimism that most people arm themselves with is highly adaptive, but not necessarily real or true. It may be true, as Thoreau said, that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, but a great many of those men—and women—get through their days by telling themselves that everything is fine, and will get better.

Will it? Not for a depressive, or at least not for a depressive who cannot do the simple, rational thing: pick up the phone and call a therapist. Because paradoxically, the farther you have sunk into the pit of depression, the less likely you will somehow manage to crawl out of it.

And Solomon asks the question: is there anything to be found in that pit? Any diamonds, or even lumps of coal? Isn’t depression linked to creativity?

I don’t think so. Yes, the depression I endured may have lead to more compassion, more understanding of suffering in others. Yes, for philosophic reasons, I have to embrace my depression, since it’s part of me, it’s part of what shaped me.

But when I was severely depressed, creativity was impossible. And even if it had been there, would I have had the patience, the endurance to learn a Bach suite or write a book? Those are more than acts of faith, they’re inherently improbable shots in the dark. And the likelihood that anyone will hear the suite or buy the book? Not high….

Really, the worst part of the depression I suffered was the loss of so much joy in the world. But it was more than that. For decades, I was starting ten feet behind everyone else in whatever race we were running. And the effect of losing so many races meant that I was pulled farther and farther behind everyone else. The feet became yards, the yards miles.

Most people…well, let me copy and paste from Wikipedia’s article on the epidemiology of depression:

People are most likely to suffer their first depressive episode between the ages of 30 and 40, and there is a second, smaller peak of incidence between ages 50 and 60.[8] The risk of major depression is increased with neurological conditions such as stroke, Parkinson's disease, or multiple sclerosis and during the first year after childbirth.

My depression started when I was in my teens, and may have stemmed in part from knowing that I was different, fearing that I was gay, and enduring the isolation that bearing that secret entailed. But more than that, the depression occurred when I was forming—quite literally—my adult self. As such, it became part of the warp and weft of my personality; in those periods when the black dog—Churchill’s metaphor for depression—had trotted off somewhere, I was still depressed. However good I might feel, I knew the dog would be howling and butting his head against the door and sighing, and I would have to rise and let him in again.

I grew up and became a fatalist—the marriage would end, the audition would be botched, sickness and death were right around the corner. And I had no baseline of happiness by which to gauge my depression. It was the only land I knew; reports of other territories I deemed anecdotal.

Had the depression been treated in my teens, what would my life have been? I might have been happier, would I have been the same? Would I have sacrificed some sensitivity, some knowledge of suffering?

If I believe that, aren’t I saying that people who have not suffered depression are less sensitive than we who have, or who do? I’m not sure I’d go there.

Nor am I sure I’d trade the decades of silent suffering for decades of euthymia, the technical name for feeling good. I think I feel as Dr. Proudie did, when his wife died: the good Lord had sent the affliction (to paraphrase Trollope), the Lord had banished the affliction; blessed be the name of the Lord!

Death of a Patrician

Now then, what to do about Ernest Chausson?

On the face of it, there’s not much that needs to be done. Despite the red squiggle that my computer has put under his name—and its suggestions of Caisson and Chausses, neither of whom I know—every music lover will know him. The Poème for violin and orchestra gets trotted out regularly, and his Poème de l’amour et de la mer falls not in the “pass the Kleenex” category but in the “hand over the razor blades.” Besides beautiful, it’s heart-wrenchingly sad.

So his reputation is secure—as long as there are violinists and mezzo-sopranos, Chausson will be heard.

The fact everybody knows about him is that he died in a bicycle accident. What isn’t known, however, is whether he willingly crashed himself into a brick wall—quite a metaphorical death, hunh?—or whether it was an accident.

He had been depressed for some time. And composition, for him, was no easy affair. “Not at all prolific,” states Wikipedia, and notes that he left only 39 opus-numbered pieces.

But he had a number of blessings. Money—first of all. His father had made a bundle redeveloping Paris (those famous boulevards are Chausson Père, partly). Friends—among whom were pretty much everybody in the cultural world of France at the time, as well as Turgenev and Albéniz. A wife and five children. A reputation that was just flourishing at the time of his death.

There was everything to live for.

The curious fact about depression is that it’s everything and nothing. An amputation, an infection, open-heart surgery—all that’s visible, on some level. But there’s not much to see, in depression. Until you choose to ride hard into a brick wall.

I read once that depression is the worst disease in terms of quality of life. Having spent some time in that dark forest, I can believe it.

It may also be that having too much money, or too much affluence / influence can be a curse. It didn’t hurt Trollope to have to get to the Royal Post every morning at 8AM. For all that the routine of work grinds you, it also grounds you.

Or just keeps your mind occupied. For in the music of Chausson, there’s the feeling of a man with quivering sensitivity. As well, a man with perhaps too much time to feel, a man who has passed feeling and entered into brooding. One commentator writes that if Chausson is to music as Proust is to literature.

He had many talents. He wrote, and then destroyed, a novel. He drew and painted, and had many friends who were artists. (Not surprising, then, that Chausson left a major collection behind….)

But he was stymied by that weapon that every writer or composer fears the most….

…the blank page.

Slack Times

Well, we live in slack times. Readers of this blog will know that I barely achieved yesterday half of what Trollope did daily over a writing career of half a century: write 2500 words.

Wait—it wasn’t a career. Just a pastime, a hobby that he did before breakfast, before he went off and invented the post box.

Well, I can’t say the effort exhausted me. But today I’m tired. It’s Sunday. Surely even a blogger is allowed a day of rest?

(81 words—2419 to go! Got your answer?)

Damn—it seems to have gotten into me. Besides, shouldn’t I be calling Eric? He sent me all those photos, plus the question—what to do about Franny’s poems, or rather the box full of ‘em that we compiled the day after she died, when we were ransacking—ooops, that’s clearing out—the house.

Well, well—Trollope would know what to do about that! Get up at 1:30 and spend three hours a day compiling them and publish them and shoot her into posterity—the Midwest’s Emily Dickenson! The moving story of a youngest son’s championing his late mother’s poetic oeuvre—damn, that word is getting to be a habit—in the years following her death!

OK—I’m not Trollope. The flesh and the spirit are weak. (Though I’m now at 220—hey, coming up to 10%!)

And speaking of Eric—did you know that he too is a blogger? Yeah, and a real one, that writing star of the family. Publishes for Psychology Today. And guess what? All his posts were snorefully ignored. Until the day he wrote about soldiers’ wives taking off their blouses and writing inspirational messages on their backs. (Though how they did that I don’t know….) Well, somehow the word “breast” got into the post and guess what!

It’s called SEO—search engine optimization. Post virtually went viral.

Hey, I could do that, you know!

Gentle Reader, do not read the following paragraph! (Note to editor—print in red.)

Breasts breasts breasts, cocks hard cocks—more breasts!—hey, and babes hot babes hot Latin babes, BOYS BOYS BOYS, hot Latin boys (oooh!), triple XXX action (redundancy there—oh, who cares!), oh, and duh, SEX SEX SEX, steamy Latin sex, steamy steamroom sex, panties panties panties, hot nipple action (don’t know where that  came from) and…

STOP!

Guess what! I’m now at 390—well over 10%, and all without having said a damn thing! This post is as meaningless as a Trollopian digression!

Hey, could I do that? Write a digression? Anyone doing that, nowadays? They teach it in the Master’s of Writing programs? Brian would know—he just got an MFA in creative writing.

Ahh, his was an idyllic childhood, with long, cow-pie flinging summer afternoons spent lazy in the cornfields of northern Illinois. The hours would pass slowly, as the gentle clouds wafted slowly (as opposed to all that fast wafting you see so much of) across the azure (nice, Marc!) sky. His mother, an indomitable pie-maker (shoot, will the reader think Mina is making cow pies? Oh forget it—it’s just a digression…) labored in her kitchen; his father ministered to the turkeys, always alert to the possibility of a sudden rain, and thus imminent death, as the turkeys, their mouths agape, scanned the sky in wonder at the atmospheric disturbance. (Not true, but who cares!) He wondered, this gentle and gentled son of the plains, of his life to come. Would he till the earth, as did his ancestors, bringing forth the fruit (err, soy beans?) of the land, the richness of the earth? Would he bask in the humid August nights, hearing the cicada destroy his evening rest? (Anyone still around?) Little did he know that breast breasts breasts—just checking to see, as well as doing a little optimization—that he would travel far, far (just love that repetition, as well as adding to the word count...) across the chilly Atlantic, the churning (oh, like my stomach?) Atlantic, reversing the journey his ancestors had made!  

646!

OK—so that was the trick. Happy to report that the stuff just writes itself. Really nothing to it.

Well, now I’m feeling bad. I really have delivered nothing of value, today. I’ve wasted your time. You deserved better. Take a look at these. Relax.

It’s Sunday.

Bet it’s the black guy….

When Grandmother is Right

I swore, as a younger man, that I would never sing that old tune, made popular by (I think) Mark Twain: “when I was twenty, I though my father was an idiot, at age 25 I was surprised how much he had learned…”

It’s so smug, assuming the young know less than us, assuming that they too will grow up and make the compromises and—too often—forget the dreams and the ideals which on occasion can have real worth. And if they don’t? Well, isn’t it better to have had them? Who wants a 21-year old Republican investment banker? I’ll take a kid writing the great American novel in a garage studio any day….

So why am I reading a book called Willpower, a New York Times Bestseller by Roy Baumeister (the social scientist) and John Tierney (science writer)?

Well, the first reason is that I want more of it. As I sit writing this, my eyes see a group of coupons for Swanson Vitamins (excellent source, by the way, and cheap), two containers of juggling balls (decided to learn to juggle in lieu of getting a job), a little device that I had no idea what use it could provide until I figured it out—it’s the iPod (from aPple!) charger.

Well, Messieurs Baumeister / Tierney would hate that. The first thing they suggest is to clean your desk. Get a to-do list that is concrete, not fuzzy. No “clean the house”—who can possibly do that? Where to start? Instead, “clean guest bathroom sink, dust piano, remove junk from desk…”

You get the idea…..

The book has much to commend it. Which is better—to give kids self-control, or to give them healthy self-esteem?

Confession—that’s the next chapter. Haven’t got to it, yet. But I did sneak and read the two quotes under the title. The first is by someone called Lady Gaga—a popular entertainer (haven’t heard her, don’t know if she can sing): “You’re a superstar no matter who you are or where you come from—and you were born that way.”

Back in a moment—gotta do 100 units of insulin for that surge in blood sugar….

The second quote is just a bit tarter: “Brats are not born. They are made.”

That’s from a lady called Deborah Carroll, a.k.a. Nanny Deb (which does suggest somebody with a bit more hands-on than Lady Gaga…)

Why do I feel that I pretty much know the thesis of this chapter—just by reading the two quotes?

OK—the book also has some great ideas for increasing will power. In the first place, like a muscle, the will can be strengthened. How? By repeated exertion, so that the act or action stops being an act of will, but becomes instead a habit.

And thus steps the explorer Henry Stanley into the book. You’ll remember him—the guy that set off into darkest Africa to find Dr. Livingstone? By the way, it appears that Stanley made up at a later date the famous line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” A fascinating guy—our Stanley. Born poor, was put into the workhouse, and emerged pretending to be an upper-class American—he even affected the accent. Anyway, he kept voluminous diary accounts—he never missed a day—and guess what one page has been torn out of all his diaries?

Yup, the day he finally stumbles on Stanley….

Well, besides being rigorous on the diarying (oh, all right, computer! Diary keeping!), he also shaved every day of his life. Even in the jungle. Even when he had yellow fever or malaria or whatever-it-was and had gone from 160 pounds to 110 pounds. Even when his beloved Miss Alice—to whom he was romantically attached; who was his North Star; who said screw-this and up and married someone else almost before the ship had left the harbor—wasn’t there to see him. Just the cannibals.

With whom he dealt quite well. In fact, on one of the expeditions, he was the ONLY guy to walk out of the jungle—his entire party had died. And yes, he seems to have understood and empathized with the natives.

Was it because he had shaved, that morning?

Yes and no. It seems that by building habits that promote self-control, you no longer have to exert self-control except when really necessary. His sense of rectitude and command, in other words, came easily. When the cannibals shouting “meat, meat!” set upon the group, Stanley had the strength to—as we would say—dialogue.

In addition, the book tackles the thorny question—why do religious people, in general, live longer and happier than agnostics / atheists? Does AA really work, with its invocation of “a higher power?”

Seems so—which is why I may start to meditate again. In the case of Stanley, he was an agnostic, as am I, officially. But his Miss Alice—that less than faithful fiancée—worked for him as God does for the religious. He spent years of his life struggling to be worthy of the woman he had chosen to be his goddess (you do have to be sorry for her—all that adoration would drive anybody into another’s arms….). So, she served him well, in a sense.

Lastly, we come to Trollope.

The learned and educated Readers of this blog don’t need to be told that Trollope has some claim to be a major Victorian novelist—and the Victorian era industriously produced some great writers. And no one was more prolific than Trollope. A more devoted blogger than I would have counted the works listed on Wikipedia. But I can tell you that the list is two-columned, AND you have to scroll to come to the end of it.

Not all was great, of course. But what is great is like nothing else. Or at least George Eliot thought so—she wrote that she could not have written Middlemarch without the novels of Barsetshire (this is too funny—Barsetshire was the fictional shire created by Trollope, and the computer has red-squiggled it! Self-reference turning back on itself?)

And how did Trollope do it? Did he devote himself to working from dawn to dusk?

Nope, he had a job—working at one point for the Royal Mail. He’s the guy who dreamed up a little red post box—an obvious idea, but novel at the time.

He also wrote every day from 5:30 to 8:30. His routine output was 2500 words per day. (This post is at 1083—and will be ending soon…) He charted his progress, and wrote in his Autobiography, “a week passed with insufficient pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.”

Well, it goes against the romantic myth of the writer, desperately awaiting the muse, struggling and fighting to give birth to a work of genius. Trollope is at his desk, counting his words—250 words a quarter-hour, 1000 words an hour. 

“I have been told that such appliances (i.e. the watch) are beneath the notice of a man of genius,” he writes. But he’s not, he claims, a man of genius. Yet goes on to say, “a small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.”

Well, such ideas—shaving in the jungle, dining formally in the desert, industriousness and duty—all seem from another time, when ladies wore corsets and the legs of the piano were seemly dressed, so as not to provoke wanton desire. The time of our grandmothers.

“You can’t grade papers with a red pen,” a student told me, I thought in jest. But no, it’s true. A paper slashed with red ink wounds the self-esteem of the students, according to popular theory. Red pens are no longer permitted in the schools.

Yeah? There was a lot not to be kept from those times. But there may also be a place for self-control—for the rigor of sane and healthy habits practiced over a lifetime.

Note to readers—1341 words. Just over half of Trollope’s daily production….

Schubert revisited

Well, I’ve heard of impaired doctors, impaired drivers, but impaired bloggers?

Which is to say you might read this post with the Morton saltbox near to hand. 

I’m loopy.

Legally loopy, I’m happy to say. Nope, not writing from Amsterdam—I’m here at my familiar desk, with the wearingly constant sound truck of the guagüita de los dulces iterating mechanically its jingle for the gazillionth time.

I spent the morning doing the second part of the dental implant surgery. And any snippy thoughts I ever had about Michael Jackson’s craving for IV hypnotics I now retract, and with shame.

The stuff is wonderful.

It’s a bit like the old television sets that slowly, in the space of just ten seconds, go from whatever inanity you’ve grown tired of to just a small white dot in the center of the screen. And then….

…nothing.

Well, who wouldn’t crave the stuff?

Right. So, I lurched home in a taxi, stood wonderingly about in CVS until a white lab-coated lady put bottles of pills in my hands, and told me to go home. I dimly realized that home was up, so I started, well—up.

Did recognize the corner jewelry store, and took a chance on a left….

Worked.

Well, an old nurse knows what to with pills in bottles, and soon I was medicated and in bed. Of course I took the Percoset—hey, anything guys pay good money for up at the punto has gotta be good, right? And is it sane to wait for the pain to arrive? Would you stand around watching until the A-bomb mushrooms, just to see how bad the radiation was?

Right—so that was the plan. Spend the afternoon in bed. Justifiable—surgery is surgery. I have a friend who spends one entire SUNDAY each month in bed, and ardently—defensively?—defends the practice.

Made it to 1:30….

Right, so what to do. I cannot do Sudoku until Raf climbs the hallway stairs in five hours. The house is a mess, but any slight mismovement (dammit, computer, I’ve just been through SURGERY—gimme a break!) of my hands might imperil the achingly tender sutures in my mouth. (And I challenge any Impudent Reader to dispute THAT!)

So I set myself to consider Raf. It was he, you remember, who diagnosed the disjointed mishmash (hah! got away with that, so what’s the deal with mismovement?) I had produced in Iguanas as a blook. Then I went on to ponder Jaime, who had pointed out that reading on an iPad becomes a different experience. Sure, there had always been illustration in books, but in a blook, there can be music.

And there is. Handel, twice; Samuel Barber; some other stuff, I think.

Well, I’m sure somebody has gotten in before me, pitched his stake, done it better. I come late to most things.

Then I got to worry about Toney, a young nephew who adopted us several years ago on the strength of Raf’s bacalao. We raised him gently, delicately, we did—the anxious gay uncles, and then sent this quite beautiful youth out to combat the wicked world. We watched, our hands clutching lace handkerchiefs pressed to our swollen eyes, as the taxi took him away.

Feeling the need for home, or perhaps just hungry, he appeared two weeks ago. We put the codfish in the water.

And set him to work. Look, I need reviews for Iguanas. No reviews, no listing in Amazon, no visibility, whaddya got? A book that goes down—hello cliché!—like that preacher’s daughter into the electronic graveyard of cache.

So we put him to read Iguanas. OK—review for bacalao. Questionably ethically—but hungry men sink low.

Right, so he liked it. And made insightful comments. And decided I really should crank out a novel. And told me what the theme would be, and provided as well the name of the main character.

What didn’t he do?

Toney, honey?

bacalao = review.

I don’t know a thing about fiction. I don’t know a thing—I think—about writing. 

Well, I feel bad about that. Anybody who has a Facebook page called “Marc Newhouse—writer” (I nixed the word “author”—after all, writing describes a discrete, simple task—author felt like a stretch, somehow….) should really try to figure what he’s doing.

The problem? Writers writing about writing write wrong. (Sorry, just sort of feel into that…onomatopoeia? Alliteration? Hyperbole? ¿Bíjte?)

It’s a form of sadism. “Don’t come whining to me,” snarls Toni Morrison. She teaches full time and writes in the summer and fall, and only Trollope beats her for fecundity.

Oh, except for Joyce Carol Oates, often described as “the word machine”, who has written over 100 books for the world to nibble upon. “If I waited for inspiration, I wouldn’t be much of a writer!” she growls.

Why do I feel that dumping 100 plus books onto the world’s bookshelves is at least grandiose if not frankly—blatantly —narcissistic?

Well, to a brain swimming in narcotics, all this hectoring, this thrashing of the pedagogical riding crop seemed to much for me. Easier just to go to the damn computer and write.

And then I realized!  

I had screwed around with creative writing! Back in the days when I was just crawling out of the pantoja or morass of depression and agititation (oh anybody can see that that’s agitation / irritation! Really!) of job and Franny loss. Reaching into the very farthest galaxies of my imagination, it was about a agonized, near catatonic, sardonic guy into classical music confronting a nincompoop psychiatrist.

I justify this as following the old line—write what you know!

But it was—following Jaime’s insight—an interesting experiment. Was it any good? Did it work?

Be gentle, Good Reader. I wasn’t at my best….

(PS—my own psychiatrist, whose single diploma in his office is from Harvard, is excellent and insightful. His predecessor, who put me on massive Klonopin and disappeared—enjoying those festive navidades we do so well? Sin comentario….)

Session Two

The patient appeared less hostile on the second visit—no doubt the therapeutic effects of the Haldol were starting. I tried to put him at ease.

“And how are we feeling today?”

“We don’t know, do we? How could we? I barely know what I am feeling, and cannot, of course, speak for you. How are you?”

“ Is your preoccupation with Schubert, the…err….Viennese composer continuing?”

“I’m hardly preoccupied,” he said. “Deeply interested, of course. Well, who wouldn’t be? Everybody should be interested in Schubert.”

“I don’t know the composer,” I said. “Perhaps you could fill me in?”

“Certainly I could fill you in. Would you like the Wikipedia version or my version? Or perhaps,” this said with a sneer, “for a doctor who is only schooled, the Wikipedia version might be the only one possible….”

I had forgotten his dislike of the word perhaps. 

“A bit of hostility still remains,” I said, deciding to confront him at last.

“I am not hostile. I admit to acerbic. Rebarbative as well. Prickly, should the previous words be too advanced for a Harvard graduate. But hardly hostile.”

I let this pass….

“Schubert?” I say.   

“Ah, Schubert,” he says, his face relaxing. “Viennese, as we know. His father, a school teacher. The mother, the daughter of a locksmith. Dates: 1797 to 1828, he died at age 31—having two years less than Mozart. Cause of death: typhoid fever, though he was also afflicted with syphilis. A terrible businessman, who barely got anything published, and that on unfavorable terms—unfavorable for him, not his publisher. Known perhaps best for his lieder—art songs, in German. Prolific—600 plus songs, nine symphonies, 15 quartets, a string quintet that is assuredly one of the greatest chamber works in the whole canon of Western music. Six masses, and 21 piano sonatas. He dies in virtual obscurity, broke, but surrounded by friends who deeply admired him. Oh, and just incidentally, he composes the two greatest song cycles in the world. That enough?”

“It seems a bit manic,” I venture.

“Your word, doctor. Mine would be possessed, a genius that may never come again….”

“Thank you,” I said. “So now I know Schubert.”

He jumps to his feet. 

“You know NOTHING about Schubert!” he roars. “I’ve been giving you the briefest sketch of his life. People spend their LIVES trying to understand Schubert, and there are mysteries that will, I believe, ever remain locked. What have you ever heard of Schubert’s music, my good philistine doctor?”

“Not much,” I say. “Didn’t he write the Unfinished Symphony?”

“Of course,” says X. “Dismissed by some, beloved by the masses. I personally like it….” 

Ahh—perhaps the basis for a clinical bond!

“So perhaps we could have your version of Schubert?”

“Mine is of little interest,” he responds. “My good doctor, have you no curiosity? Wouldn’t you like, for once in your life, to enter into a masterpiece? To experience something that is greater, truer than anything you or I will ever do? I could play you one song—ONE song—that had he written nothing else would have established him as one of the greatest composers of all time.”

“I’d like to hear it,” I say, though really, I don’t much like classical music.

“Nothing easier,” says X, and pulls his iPhone from his pocket. He fiddles with it, and then shows me the following clip from YouTube. We listen, and blessedly, it’s short.

“So,” says X. “You now have been initiated. You have heard one of over a thousand compositions of Schubert. Your impression, please?”

“Well,” I say, “speaking clinically, it sounds deeply sad. Depressive, I would say.”

“You know, doctor, I am far less interested in your clinical impressions than in your reaction as a man, a person. But I am perhaps being unfair. No one can grasp the song without knowing the lyrics. Let’s listen again, this time with the lyrics, German and English.”

He hands me the liner notes.

Heil’ge Nacht, du sinkest nieder; Nieder wallen auch die Träume Wie dein Mondlicht durch die Räume, Durch der Menschen stille Brust. Die belauschen sie mit Lust; Rufen, wenn der Tag erwacht: Kehre wieder, heil’ge Nacht! Holde Träume, kehret wieder!

“And now,” he says, let’s turn to another singer, with the lyrics in English. Much slower, and a bit more operatic. Well, it would be—Fleming, of course. But here, she does a fine job
.

We listen again. And I am still more mystified. 

“The title of the song, by the way, is Nacht und Traume—Night and Dreams. Tell me, my good psychiatrist, isn’t that rather up your alley? You do do stuff with dreams, don’t you?”

“I’m feeling a little out of my league,” I say.

“I’m delighted to know that,” says X. “It’s a poem that is seemingly simple, and yet Schubert brings out the most amazing depths in it…. Consider it just as a poem.”

Holy night, you sink down; Dreams, too, drift down Like your moonlight through space, Through the quiet hearts of men; They listen with delight Calling out when day awakens: Return, holy night! Fair dreams, return!

“Really, not much to it. But I listen to it often, on those many nights when Holy night does not  drift down. I suffer insomnia, you see….”

“Ahh,”  I say, “a sedative may be called for. Something more than the Dalmane. But tell me, what does this song, this poem, mean to you?”

Again, as he had in the first session, X dissolves in tears.

“Dreams,” he says, weeping. “Have you never had dreams? And had them die? And wish, more than anything else for their return? This is Schubert, in his moment of darkest sorrow—lost and yearning—imploring God to return him to his path, and restore his dreams. And filled with despair, he manages to suggest the possibility of hope, of redemption. A feeling I, frankly, do not share”

Clinical note: Will add halcyon 2 mg. for sleep.