“There is a languor of the life, more imminent than pain; it is pain’s successor, when the soul has suffered all it can.”
The other night I was watching the latest Battlestar Gallactica, when Adama spoke those words in voiceover and my hair stood on end. It was as if someone had reached into my soul and given voice to its exact condition. It is something I had previously attempted to describe as a Dry Depression, a state not of despair, but of a kind of post-despair that allows laughter without enjoyment, and pleasure without fulfillment. The quote, by the way, is from Emily Dickinson.
Years ago, I used to read Richard Ford’s novels of men in midlife crisis with diligence, persisting from the writing, but not really getting the point. Midlife crisis seemed vacuous to me. Now I understand: it is vacuous indeed–stupendously, black hole-ishly vacuous, and hungry, and empty of poetry or meaning. Last night I took a box of family photos out of the attic, and found that moisture had invaded–a clump of them were stuck together irreparably, while the rest had simply dimmed and faded. They looked like the pictures of other people’s relatives you find in a suitcase bought at the Salvation Army. I thought: I am completely untethered now; I’ve outlived my own memories.
What prompted me finally to blog this? Not the passing of that other middle-aged malcontent, John Updike, but a post by my sister-in-law, Nancy, which is its exact opposite.