Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
Interpretation
Reading is a powerful tool to combat feelings of loneliness.
William Styron suggests that the act of reading serves as an effective means to alleviate loneliness. By immersing oneself in literature, a person can escape the confines of their solitude and connect with diverse thoughts, experiences, and emotions expressed by various authors.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literature, I quoted Styron to emphasize how reading can enrich our lives.
The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.
Everything you possess of skill, and wealth, and handicraft, wasn't it first merely a thought and a quest?
We are always on the anvil; by trials God is shaping us for higher things.
I don't worry about the last shot or the next shot. I concentrate. Every shot gets a clean slate. And when a shot is over, I wipe it out absolutely. Tell a joke or something. If you worry about how you looked, how well you did, you'll go insane.
It is equally important to investigate wellness as it is to study misery.
Learn to get from the day. Not just get through it, get from it. Soak it up. Each day is a piece of the mosaic of your life.
All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.
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