« In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state. It is a barren, fatiguing, and agitated condition; one without hope or capacity; a world that is, as A. Alvarez has put it, “airless and without exits.” Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage […] is first gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous. It is also vacillating, ruminative, indecisive, and self castigating. The body is bone weary; there is no will; nothing is that is not an effort, or all-consuming. Like an unstable gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action. »

“Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than itself.”