Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness PDF book by William Styron Read Online or Free Download in ePUB, PDF or MOBI eBooks. Published in 1990 the book become immediate popular and critical acclaim in autobiography, memoir books. That Styron survived his descent into madness is something of a miracle. That he manages to convey its tortuous progression and his eventual recovery with such candor and precision makes Darkness Visible a rare feat of literature, a book that will arouse a shock of recognition even in those readers who have been spared the suffering it describes.

• William Styron Darkness Visible Pdf
• William Styron Darkness Visible

Read the following segments fromWilliam Styron's description of depression. Why is the “mentalpain” of depression so difficult to describe to those who have not experiencedit? Note Styron’s metaphors, e.g., drowning or suffocation, to try to describethis.

Why does Styron feel a need to “register a strong protest againstthe word ‘depression’”?

What do you make of Styron’s claim that depression, in its extremeform, is madness? Why have we banished this, and other harsh old-fashionedwords relating to mental illness (e.g., asylum, insanity, melancholia,lunatic)?

In Styron’s estimation, why is suicide so closely linked todepression?

Why is the depressed person in the situation of the “walkingwounded”? How does this affect others’ understanding of the depressed person’sillness?

Does Kenyon’s poem (above) capture aspects of the experience ofdepression that cannot be articulated in Styron’s prose? Is the reverse alsothe case?

William Styron, DarknessVisible (excerpts)

Depression is a disorder ofmood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to theself—to the mediating intellect—as too verge close to being beyond description,It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it inits extreme mode, although the gloom, “the blues” which people go throughoccasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are ofsuch prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in itscatastrophic form. But at the time of which I write I had descended far pastthose familiar, manageable doldrums.

I had come to a point where Iwas carefully monitoring each phase of my deteriorating condition. Myacceptance of the illness followed several months of denial during which, at first,I had ascribed the malaise and restlessness and sudden fits of anxiety towithdrawal from alcohol; I had abruptly abandoned whiskey and all otherintoxicants that June.

pp.16-18

I was feeling in my mind asensation close to, but indescribably different from, actual pain. This leadsme to touch again on the elusive nature of such distress. That the word“indescribable” should present itself is no fortuitous, since it has to beemphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferersfrom this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict fortheir friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actualdimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has beengenerally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failureof sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form oftorment so alien to everyday experience. For myself, the pain is most closelyconnected to drowning or suffocation—but even these images are off the mark.William James, who battled depression for many years, gave up the search for anadequate portrayal, implying it near-impossibility when he wrote in TheVarieties of Religious Experience: “It is a positive and active anguish, a sortof psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.”

The pain persisted during mymuseum tour and reached crescendo in the next few hours when, back at thehotel, I fell onto the bed and lay gazing at the ceiling, nearly immobilizedand in a trance of supreme discomfort. Rational thought was usually absent frommy mind at such times, hence trance. I can think of no more apposite word forthis state of being, a condition of helpless stupor in which cognition wasreplaced by that “positive and active anguish.” And one of the most unendurableaspects of such an interlude was the inability to sleep. It had been my customof a near-lifetime, to settle myself into a soothing nap in the late afternoon,but the disruption of normal sleep patterns is a notoriously devastatingfeature of depression; to the injurious sleeplessness with which I had beenafflicted each night was added the insult of this afternoon insomnia,diminutive by comparison but all the more horrendous because it struck duringthe hours of the most intense misery. It had become clear that I would never begranted even a few minutes’ relief from my full-time exhaustion. I clearlyrecall thinking, as I lay there while Rose sat nearby reading, that myafternoons and evenings were becoming almost measurably worse, and that thisepisode was the worst to date.

pp 36-38

When I was aware that I had beenlaid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register astrong protest against the word “depression.” Depression, most people know, usedto be termed ‘melancholia,” a word which appears in English as early as theyear 1305 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to beaware of its pathological nuances. “Melancholia” would still appear to be a farmore apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of this disorder, but it wasusurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence,used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, atrue wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientistgenerally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns HopkinsMedical School faculty member justly venerated—the Swiss-born Adolf Meyer—had atin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of thesemantic damage he had inflicted by offering “Depression” as a descriptive nounfor such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-fiveyears the word had slithered innocuously through the language like a slug,leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its veryinsipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease whenout of control.

As one who has suffered from themalady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a trulyarresting designation. “Brainstorm,” for instance, has unfortunately beenpreempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration. Butsomething along these lines is needed. Told that someone’s mood disorder hasevolved into a storm—a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeedwhat a clinical depression resembles like nothing else—even the uninformedlayman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that‘depression” evokes, something akin to So what?” pr “You’ll pull out of it” or“We all have bad days. The phrase “nervous breakdown” seems on its way out,certainly deservedly so, owing to its insinuation of a vague spinelessness, butwe still seem destined to be saddled with “depression” until a better, sturdiername is created.

pp 43-50.

I felt a kind of numbness, anenervation, but more particularly an odd fragility—as if my body had actuallybecome frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normalcoordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria. Nothingfelt quite right with my corporeal self there were twitches and pains,sometimes intermittent, often seemingly constant, that seemed to presage allsorts of dire infirmities. (Given these signs, one can understand how, as farback as the seventeenth century-in the notes of contemporary physicians, and inthe perceptions of John Dryden and others—a connection is made betweenmelancholia and hypochondria; the words are often interchangeable, and so wereused until the nineteenth century by writers as various as Sir Walter Scott andthe Brontes, who also linked melancholy to a preoccupation with bodily ills.)It is easy to see how this condition is part of the psyche’s apparatus ofdefense: unwilling to accept its own gathering deterioration, the mindannounces to its indwelling consciousness that it is the body with its perhapscorrectable defects—not the precious and irreplaceable mind—that is goinghaywire. In my case, the overall effect was immensely disturbing, augmentingthe anxiety that was by now never quite absent from my waking hours and fuelingstill another strange behavior pattern—a fidgety recklessness that kept me onthe move, somewhat to the perplexity of my family and friends.

…By now I had moved back to myhouse in Connecticut. It was October, and one of the unforgettable features ofthis stage of my disorder was the way in which my own farmhouse, my belovedhome for thirty years, took on for me at that point when my spirits regularlysank to their nadir an almost palpable quality of ominousness. The fadingevening light—akin to that famous “slant of light” of Emily Dickinson’s, whichspoke to her of death, of chill extinction—had none of its familiar autumnalloveliness, but ensnared me in a suffocating gloom. I wondered how thisfriendly place, teeming with such memories of (again in her words) “Lads andGirls,” of “laughter and ability and Sighing,/ And frocks and Curls,” couldalmost perceptibly seem so hostile and forbidding. Physically, I was not alone.As always Rose was present and listened with unflagging patience to mycomplaints. But I felt an immense and aching solitude. I could no longerconcentrate during those afternoon hours, which for years had been my workingtime, and the act of writing itself, becoming more and more difficult andexhausting, stalled, then finally ceased.

There were also dreadful,pouncing seizures of anxiety. One bright day on a walk through the woods withmy dog I heard a flock of Canada geese honking high above trees ablaze withfoliage; ordinarily a sight and sound that caused me to stop, riveted withfear, and I stood stranded there, helpless, shivering, aware for the first timethat I had been stricken by no mere pangs of withdrawal but a serious illnesswhose name and actuality I was able finally acknowledge. Going home, I couldn’trid my mind of Baudelaire’s, dredged up from the distant past, that for severaldays had been skittering around at the edge of my consciousness: “I have feltthe wind of the wing of madness.”

William Styron Darkness Visible Pdf

Our perhaps understandablemodern need to dull the sawtooth edges of so many afflictions we are heir tohad led us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity,melancholia, lunatic, madness. But never let it be doubted that depression, inits extreme form, is madness. The madness results from an aberrant biochemicalprocess. It has been established with reasonable certainty (after strongresistance from many psychiatrists, and not all that long ago) that suchmadness is chemically induced amid the neurotransmitters of the brain, probablyas the result of systemic stress, which for unknown reasons causes a depletionof the chemicals norepinephrine and serotonin, and the increase of a hormone,cortisol. With all this upheaval in the brain tissues, the alternate drenchingand deprivation, it is no wonder that the mind begins to feel aggrieved,stricken, and the muddied thought processes register the distress of an organin conclusion. Sometimes, though not very often, such a disturbed mind willturn to violent thoughts regarding others. But with their minds turnedagonizingly inward, people with depression are usually only dangerous tothemselves. The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis ofviolence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are theslowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close tozero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.

That fall, as the disordergradually took full possession of my system, I began to conceive that my minditself was like one of those out-moded small-town telephone exchanges, beinggradually inundated by floodwaters: one by one, the normal circuits began todrown, causing some of the functions of the body and nearly all those of theinstinct and intellect to slowly disconnect.

There is a well-known checklistof some of these functions and their failures. Mine conked out fairly close toschedule, many of them following the pattern of depressive seizures. I particularlyremember the lamentable near-disappearance of my voice. It underwent a strangetransformation, becoming at times quite faint, wheezy and spasmodic—a friendobserved later that it was the voice of a ninety-year-old. The libido also madean early exit, as it does in most major illnesses—it is the superfluous need ofa body in beleaguered emergency. Many people lose all appetite; mine wasrelatively normal, but I found myself eating only for subsistence: food, likeeverything else within the scope of sensation, was utterly without savor. Mostdistressing of all the instinctual disruptions was that of sleep, along with acomplete absence of dreams..

…my few hours of sleep wereusually terminated at three or four in the morning, when I stared up intoyawning darkness, wondering and writhing at the devastation taking place in mymind, and awaiting the dawn, which usually permitted me a feverish, dreamlessnap. I’m fairly certain that it was during one of these insomniac trances thatthere came over me the knowledge—a weird and shocking revelation, like that ofsome long-beshrouded metaphysical truth—that this condition would cost me mylife if it continued on such a course….

What I had begun to discover isthat, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience,the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality ofphysical pain., like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say thatdespair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche,comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercelyoverheated room. And because no breeze sites this caldron, because there is noescape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victimbegins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.

pp 62-63

In depression the faith indeliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, andwhat makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy willcome—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, oneknows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness evenmore than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily lifeinvolves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation toanother less annoying—or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredomto activity—but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly,one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes, And this resultsin a striking experience—one which I have called, borrowing militaryterminology, the situation of the walking wounded. For in virtually any otherserious sickness, a patient who felt similar devastation would be lying flat inbed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-supportsystems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolatedsetting. His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned and honorablyattained. However, the sufferer from depression has no such option andtherefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the mostintolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguishdevouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associatedwith ordinary events and companionship. He must ry to utter small talk, and beresponsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, evensmile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words.

That December evening, forexample, I could have remained in bed as usual during those worst hours, oragreed to the dinner party my wife had arranged downstairs. But the very ideaof a decision was academic. Either course was torture, and I chose the dinnernot out of any particular merit but through indifference to what I knew wouldbe indistinguishable ordeals of fogbound horrors. At dinner I was barely ableto speak, but the quartet of guests, who were all good friends, were aware ofmy condition and politely ignored my catatonic muteness. Then, after dinner,sitting in the living room, I experienced a curious inner convulsion that I candescribe only as despair beyond despair. It came out of the cold night. I didnot think such anguish possible.

William Styron Darkness Visible