Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life Read Online Free PDF

including despair itself. Because the words reach into your soul, literature does what television cannot. It stays with you, and the words linger. They have impact. They give you goosebumps. They can make you laugh, or weep with joy. This is why, in scientific experiments monitoring the brains of people reading classic novels, ripples of activation and pleasure are detected by the equipment.

Task 1: A story that grabs you
Even if you’ve never done so before, I want you to pay a visit to my ‘church’. There’s one in every town. It’s not an ordinary church but a Book Church, otherwise known as your local library. Go in and have a look round: shelves full of these strange collections of bound pages, spines facing outwards. Not technological, yet they tower above you. Some of them were written hundreds of years ago. Some weigh a ton.
Sense the atmosphere. Libraries are quiet, because most people respect the thousands of books that are housed here and speak in a whisper. In one section there are computers, but you won’t be going on those. What you are about to do can’t be experienced on a computer, or on the Internet. You have to be in this place to get the ‘feel’ for it.
I want you to walk over to the shelves marked FICTION, and without paying particular attention to the spines, or the authors’ names or titles, take down a book and open it in the middle. Read a paragraph or two. Put the book back on the shelf and repeat this three times so that you have looked inside four books. This is exactly how generations of children have discovered the joys of reading for the first time. You still see adults doing it in bookshops, on stations and at the airport. Dip in and look at the words till you find the ones you want.
One of those books will catch your attention, because of the language, or the dialogue, or the story. Look at the spine and remember the title, and the name of the author. You can even check it out for free if you like. Take it home and find out what happens.
    THE ‘BLUE DEVILS’
    Famous writers achieve their fame because they entertain us with their imaginative ideas, and because they put into words what we all feel. One literary genius who famously suffered from despair was the so-called Northampton Peasant Poet John Clare, who was stricken by the ‘blue devils’ yet produced over ten thousand pages of manuscript, an outpouring of passionate observation of nature, both in poetryand prose, the sheer volume and immediacy of which is unrivalled anywhere in English literature. He wrote:
I am – yet what I am – who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes:
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am; I live, like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteem,
And all that’s dear, e’en those I love the best
Are strange – nay, they are stranger than the rest …
    EXERCISE
• Look at John Clare’s words. He wrote them when he was consigned to a mental asylum and had lost everything. He keeps saying, again and again, I am . Why?
 
• Some of the words are ‘archaic’ – like ‘e’en’ and ‘nay’, but most of them convey exactly the same sense to us as they would have done to Clare 150 years ago.
 
• They are stark. They repeat the same thought, and they are insistent and driven (‘into the nothingness … into the living sea’). Is the writer saying things in different ways because he hopes finally to be understood in one of them? Or is he trying to make sense of very painful ideas and feelings that threaten to overwhelm him?
 
• Some expressions are unfamiliar to us, like ‘love’s frenzied throes’. What does he mean by that?
 
• Look at the style. Why are the words written in short lines on the page? If you wrote them out