By Leslie Kendall Dye | Thursday, September 04, 2014 - Off the Shelf“It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” There are many ways to describe depression. The trouble is, if you survive it, you are usually eager to put the past behind you and too weary from the battle you’ve waged to sit down and write the list of metaphors that come to mind. William Styron, in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, is brave enough to revisit the darkest hour of his life and energetic enough to record it in detail. His memoir is a gift to anyone seeking to understand the nature of the illness, its progression, its symptoms, and the helplessness of those in its grip.
In fewer than one hundred pages, with an elegant, spare, and masterful use of the English language, Styron chronicles his battle with madness, his attempts to seek help from doctors ill-equipped to handle a patient as ill as he, and the despair he felt in trying to maintain any semblance of a normal life as he lost his grasp on reality. This sharply drawn chronicle drives a stake through the heart of the stigma that surrounds the disease. We follow many months of his journey through madness.
We watch him fail to behave appropriately at a dinner in Paris honoring his literary achievements, we watch him lose his voice, his normal gait, his ability to smile or converse, we witness his childlike desperation at misplacing ordinary possessions like his eyeglasses or his newspaper. We watch him grasp at these objects because they have become symbols of his old normal life. He is like a man going blind and turning in circles to find remaining patches of light. At last we see him find salvation at a hospital, where he describes the relief of the disease’s capitulation and his gradual return from the brink of hanging himself from the rafters of his farmhouse.
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