“During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage in the future? Why should I go on? There is nothing ahead, my powers are failing, I am aging. I do not want to continue in the future as i see it. These and other more urgent things, the details of life…and so, on the little surface of life, these deeper questions being so preemptory, there is nothing to advance by way of conversation. One’s real state of mind is a source of shame. So one is necessarily silent about it, leaving nothing else for subject matter. Therefore, one listens, bullied by others’ talk, that very talk an invasion. Yet, one needs to have something said, something to fly across a restaurant table, even if it’s the interminable description of a conference one didn’t attend and cares nothing about. Since one’s field of interest is now very small. Oneself. In danger. The loss of language is so crucial, such a bereavement. Language does not really go away, it goes inward. Downward. Shriveling in the process, becoming repetitious, as when one facing great peril repeats the same protective formulas. Yet one mourns language, sociability, camaraderie, needing it now more than ever. And how necessary it becomes just as one observes its superficiality, the wavering of friends, the coldness of strangers, the essential uncaring of life itself, its monstrosity. And in the face of this evil—not even to have words to protect one from the vacuum. To grow mute as well as helpless.”
