The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness

By Maria Popova

Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness

It starts with a low hum that adheres itself to the underbelly of the hours like another dimension. Gradually, surreptitiously, the noise swells to a bellowing bass line, until it drowns out the symphony of life.

It can last for days or months or entire seasons of being. It visited Keats frequently in his short life, leaving him with a mind empty of ideas and hands heavy as lead. It rendered Lorraine Hansberry “cold, useless, frustrated, helpless, disillusioned, angry and tired.” It drove Abraham Lincoln to the brink of suicide.

If you are lucky enough, if you have the right aids of science, social support, and chance, one day you look over the shoulder of time and, like the poet Jane Kenyon, gasp in grateful incomprehension: “What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment?” But until that moment comes, as William Styron so vividly observed in his classic bridge of empathy, “the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.”

Among the legion of us soaked by the drizzle is one of the most beloved artists of our epoch, whose music has made life brighter and more livable for generations.

Bruce Springsteen driving cross-country in 1987. (Photograph from Born to Run.)

In his memoir, Born to Run (public library), Bruce Springsteen writes about his father’s “long, drawn-out depressions,” often so debilitating that he could not rise from bed for days, and about his own tumble toward the edge of the abyss quarried by his genetic inheritance and the darknesses of his childhood, and about what kept him from falling. “God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he’s no longer God,” John Lennon reflected in his most personal interview, but no outside “they” — no critic, no cry from the public — ever measures up to the inner chorus of anguish that most cruelly lowers an artist from the pedestal of their creative power and into the pit of depression.

In a particularly vivid vignette from the period just before he finally sought help, Springsteen writes:

My depression is spewing like an oil spill all over the beautiful turquoise-green gulf of my carefully planned and controlled existence. Its black sludge is threatening to smother every last living part of me.

Even Springsteen’s favorite books reflect this lifelong undertone of black. But it is in his BBC Desert Island Discs appearance that he opens up most candidly about his experience of depression and his life-honed coping mechanisms for it. He reflects:

I’ve developed some skills that help me in dealing with it, but still — it is a powerful, powerful thing that really comes up from things that still remain unexplainable to me.

Bruce Springsteen. (Photograph: BBC.)

After noting that much of it is pure biochemistry, and can therefore be greatly salved by biochemical interventions, he considers the psychological skills that have helped him temper the onslaught and offers a Buddhist-like strategy of unresistant presence with the flow of experience on its own terms, laced with a gentle admonition against the trap of blamethirsty projection:

Just naming it [helps]… What most people tend to want to do is, when they feel bad, the first thing you want to do is to name a reason why you feel that way: “I feel bad because…” and you’ll transfer that to someone else “…because Johnny said this to me,” or “this happened.” And, sometimes, that’s true. But a lot of times, you’re simply looking to name something that’s not particularly nameable and if you misname it, it just makes everything that much worse.

So my “skill” is sort of saying, “Okay, it’s not this, it’s not that — it’s just this. This is something that comes; it’s also something that goes — and maybe something I have to live with for a period of time.”

But if you can acknowledge it and you can relax with it a little bit, very often it shortens its duration.

Complement with Bloom — a touching animated short film about depression and what it takes to recover the light of being — and Tim Ferriss on how he survived his suicidal depression, then revisit Robert Burton’s centuries-old salve for melancholy and two centuries of beloved writers — including Keats, Whitman, Hansberry, Carson, and Thoreau — on the mightiest antidote to depression.

BP

Ode to a Good Pen: A Poem About Writing the Book of Love, Read by Nick Cave

By Maria Popova

I spent the summer using the fantastic binomial technique developed by Gianni Rodari — the beloved Italian writer whose stories lit up my Bulgarian childhood — as a creative prompt for poetry, part of the larger binomial two people co-create when their worlds touch each other in a meaningful way. Each week I’d be given two unrelated words and tasked with twining them into a poem.

Summers end. Worlds tilt away from each other, drift apart, resume their orbit, transformed. This is how the final binomial — “dust” and “life” — wrote itself in me, read here by the living poem that is Nick Cave.

ODE TO A GOOD PEN
by Maria Popova

Over and over
we borrow the book of love
from the lending library of the possible
and ask of it
        everything,
only to find its pages
blank and beckoning,
impelling us
to keep writing the story
as it keeps changing,
keeps reading us
back to ourselves —
an endless translation
from some other tongue,
unfinished and unfinishable,
written in dust
between endpapers
marbled with life.

Then, “Forgiveness.”

BP

The Moving Letter James Baldwin Received from His Childhood Teacher at the Peak of His Fame and His Heartbreak

By Maria Popova

The Moving Letter James Baldwin Received from His Childhood Teacher at the Peak of His Fame and His Heartbreak

In early 1934, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at Columbia Teachers College took an internship teaching drama and producing student plays at PS 24 in Harlem. Among her young charges at that “dreadful ancient New York schoolhouse,” as she would later recall, was a ten-year-old boy she was astonished to find reading, like her, Dickens. Their conversations quickly made her realize that “here was an exceptional and brilliant boy.”

Her name was Orilla Miller, though he called her Bill. His name was Jimmy, though to the world he would become James Baldwin.

Bill started giving Jimmy more books. He devoured them. Although he would recall that he loved her “absolutely, with a child’s love,” she discussed them with him like a peer. Suddenly, the bookishness and sensitivity that had rendered him strange to others were not only accepted but encouraged, cherished, held in kinship.

His father — a storefront church preacher who preached that white people were the Devil and who banned all books but the Bible from his house — didn’t like it one bit when Bill walked Jimmy home to ask permission to take him to the theater, which was also banned in the Baldwin household. But, like an ice-capped volcano, David Baldwin gave his consent with seething politeness.

“My first conscious calculation as to how to go about defeating the world’s intentions for me,” Baldwin would later write of his first cultural outing with Bill, “began on that Saturday afternoon.”

The defeat was total and triumphant. Baldwin was still in his twenties when his first novel catapulted him into celebrity. The novels and essays that followed established him as one of the most urgent yet enduring literary voices of his century, reverberating with that rare combination of passion and rigor by which writing survives the fads, formulas, and moral fashions of its time to touch the future, to shape it into being.

James Baldwin with Orilla and her husband Evan, 1976.

In the spring of 1963, at the peak of his fame which was also the peak of his heartbreak, that slow-burning acceptance of the dissolution of a great love, Baldwin traveled to Los Angeles for a series of lectures he had committed to give for CORE — the Congress for Racial Equality. There in the crowded hall was Bill, with her husband Evan.

They hadn’t seen each other in seventeen years.

Shyly, she made her way to him through the sea of people after the talk just as his press team was shepherding him onward to another appearance. “But she’s my teacher,” he protested, “don’t you understand? She’s my teacher!” They didn’t, whisking him away before Bill reached him.

Across the infinite abyss of that short distance, she found herself, like everyone, impressed by his intellect and eloquence, but moved by something else — the simple recognition that her dear “sweet boy” had become “a sweet man.”

A few days later, in a lovely mirror-image to the tender letter of gratitude Albert Camus wrote to his childhood teacher shortly after becoming the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, she sent him a letter quoted in Nicholas Boggs’s altogether magnificent biography Baldwin: A Love Story (public library):

May 15, 1963

James,

I want to tell you that the promise of the wonderful child has been fulfilled in the man. I am not referring alone to the development of your writing ability, the incisive use of your intelligence in social commentary. I am referring to the moral you — in the broad sense of one’s individual relationship to man around him. That Evan and I had a small part in your life adds to the value of ours. I also say, thank you, that there is this James Baldwin in America in the year 1963

Two days later, LIFE Magazine published Baldwin’s most personal and passionate interview. In it, he insisted that the emotional and spiritual role of the artist is “is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” This, too, is the role of every great teacher. And of every true friend.

BP

Kahlil Gibran on the Art of Becoming Yourself Across the Sweep of Life

By Maria Popova

The unfolding of life does more than fray our bodies with entropy — it softens our spirit, blunting the edge of vanity and broadening the aperture of beauty, so that we become both more ourselves and more unselved, awake to the felicitous interdependence of the world. And yet the selves we have been — young and foolish, hungry for the wrong things, hopeful for the right but winged by hope into hubris — are elemental building blocks of who we become, unsheddable like the hydrogen and helium that made the universe. Joan Didion knew this when she observed that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Jane Ellen Harrison knew it when, in her superb meditation on the art of growing older, she cautioned that “you cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no ‘you’ except your life — lived.”

That transmutation and integration is what poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) takes up with uncommon soulfulness in his long poem “Youth and Age,” penned in his early forties, shortly after he completed The Prophet.

Kahlil Gibran, self-portrait

In his youth, Gibran reflects, he felt doomed to insignificance, dwarfed by a universe that seemed immense and remote. But as he matured, he learned to live with “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great” — to inhabit that elemental aloneness with a sense of boundless belonging to the universe and every other aloneness in it.

In a sentiment consonant with the aging Walt Whitman’s reckoning with what makes life worth living, he traces his path:

In my youth the heart of dawn was in my heart, and the songs of April were in my ears.

But my soul was sad unto death, and I knew not why. Even unto this day I know not why I was sad.

But now, though I am with eventide, my heart is still veiling dawn,

And though I am with autumn, my ears still echo the songs of spring.

But my sadness has turned into awe, and I stand in the presence of life and life’s daily miracles.

In a lovely metaphor rooted in the evolutionary history of life, he contrasts the spirit of youth to that of our later years:

The difference between my youth which was my spring, and these forty years, and they are my autumn, is the very difference that exists between flower and fruit.

A flower is forever swayed with the wind and knows not why and wherefore.

But the fruit overladen with them honey of summer, knows that it is one of life’s home-comings, as a poet when his song is sung knows sweet content,

Though life has been bitter upon his lips.

Passionflower and passionfruit by Étienne Denisse from Flore d’Amérique, 1846. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

With an eye to the restlessness of youth, Gibran echoes his earlier reflections on befriending time as he contemplates what might be the supreme reward of growing older — our widening capacity for patience, for the spaciousness that meets life on its own terms and becomes one with the unfolding mystery:

In my youth I longed for the unknown, and for the unknown I am still longing.

But in the days of my youth longing embraced necessity that knows naught of patience.

Today I long not less, but my longing is friendly with patience, and even waiting.

And I know that all this desire that moves within me is one of those laws that turns universes around one another in quiet ecstasy, in swift passion which your eyes deem stillness, and your mind a mystery.

In a poignant reminder that our aversive reactions reveal not the nature of the things we abhor but the nature of our blinders and the limits of our understanding, he adds:

In my youth I loved beauty and abhorred ugliness, for beauty was to me a world separated from all other worlds.

But now that the gracious years have lifted the veil of picking-and-choosing from over my eyes, I know that all I have deemed ugly in what I see and hear, is but a blinder upon my eyes, and wool in my ears;

And that our senses, like our neighbors, hate what they do not understand.

A century before science illuminated the poetics of wintering trees as a lens on renewal, Gibran writes:

In my youth, of all seasons I hated winter, for I said in my aloneness, “Winter is a thief who robs the earth of her sun-woven garment, and suffers her to stand naked in the wind.”

But now I know that in winter there is re-birth and renewal, and that the wind tears the old raiment to cloak her with a new raiment woven by the spring.

Ever/After by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

Touching on a concept known in Eastern spiritual traditions as non-identification — the ability to inhabit our vaster nature beyond transient circumstances and conditions — he writes:

In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons.

Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down.

He ends the poem by looking back on the sad alienation of his youth as the rudiment of his fruition, indispensable and sacred:

Yes, in my youth I was a thing, sad and yielding, and all the seasons played with me and laughed in their hearts.

And life took a fancy to me and kissed my young lips, and slapped my cheeks.

Today I play with the seasons. And I steal a kiss from life’s lips ere she kisses my lips.

And I even hold her hands playfully that she may not strike my cheek.

In my youth I was sad indeed, and all things seemed dark and distant.

Today, all is radiant and near, and for this I would live my youth and the pain of my youth, again and yet again.

Complement with Simone de Beauvoir on the art of growing older and how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, then revisit Gibran’s luminous wisdom on the courage to know yourself, the building blocks of friendship, how to raise children, how to weather the uncertainties of love, and the secret to a lasting relationship.

BP

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