There exists an undeniable pleasure in knowing that everything you do has no real basis, that whether or not you commit an action is a matter of indifference. The fact nonetheless remains that in our daily gestures we compromise with Vacuity — that is, we turn and turn about, and occasionally, at the same time, we take the world as real and unreal. We mingle pure truths and sordid truths and this amalgam, the thinker’s disgrace, is the living man’s revenge.

So far as we know, ours is the only species which feels driven to find meaning. Such a drive is often painful, but it is autonomous and we cannot help but seek it . . . We can never comprehend this mystery, or it would not be mystery, but we frequently experience its intimations in the concretization of relationships, in the metaphors of dream life and in sudden epiphanies of depth. Wheresoever we intimate the presence of depth, in cosmos, in nature, in others or in self, we are in the precincts of soul.

Depression can feel like a well with no bottom, but from a Jungian perspective intrapsychic depression is a well with a bottom, though we may have to dive very deeply to find it. Think of what the word means literally, to de-press, to press down. What is "pressed down"? Life's energy, life's intentionality, life's teleology is pressed down, thwarted, denied, violated. While the etiology of such pressing down may or may not be discernible, something in us colludes with it. We might even say that the quantity and quality of the depression is a function of the quantity and quality of the life force which is being pressed down. Life is warring against life, and we are the unwilling host.

“How many thousands have I spent on perfume and alcohol, cigarettes and Turkish baths, disappointing trips and third-class movies; how many months in silent bars or parks, expecting, in a chair with a book not reading, or waiting in line, waiting in line? Who will tell me it’s a loss when I know life must be for pleasure? The parks were balanced by museums, the baths by oceans, bars by composition, and the dreaming chair by books finished. Nothing is waste that makes a memory.”