sadness

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“I no longer plumb the depths of despair. My sadness has become a springboard. In the past I used to think that I would always be sad, but now I know that those moments too are part of life’s ebb and flow and that all is well. This is a sign of confidence, of very great confidence, even in myself. I have gradually come to realize that I am going to manage my life properly.”

Etty Hillesum

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source: diary entry dated January 11, 1942, in Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life, the Diaries, 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork (New York: Picador, 1996), 83.

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category: confidence, despair, sadness

medium: diary

“When did the Dark happen?”

Emily Dickinson

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source: The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 390.

category: dark, depression, melancholy, sadness

medium: letter

notes: letter to Samuel Bowles, about 11 January 1862

“Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can’t out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.”

Elizabeth McCracken

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source: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 132.

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category: depression, geography, melancholy, perspective, sadness, travel

medium: memoir

“…you know from having watched friends of yours who have gone through loss that it doesn’t tend to be a big muscle thing, that it’s not the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s those small disconnections from life, from energy, from happiness, that kind of subtle way in which people who have lost people they love are tilted away from the world.”