Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive,” the poet May Sarton wrote in contemplating the self-reliant cure for despair. A century and a half earlier, the Scottish philosopher, mathematician, and writer Thomas Carlyle (December 4, 1795–February 5, 1881) examined the question of self-salvation when one’s interior world blackens from the complementary sides — reaching in and reaching out.
In one of his intense and beautiful courtship letters to his future wife, collected in The Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh (public library | public domain), Carlyle considers what self-help really means in moments of blackest despair — those times when it feels like “the Graces cannot live under a sky so gloomy and tempestuous,” when it seems like “there is no remedy” but the remedy within.
Deploying two perfectly placed allusions to Milton’s Paradise Lost, the twenty-seven-year-old Carlyle writes in a letter from February 13 of 1822:
There are wild retreats, indeed, in which…
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