Maria Popova describes depression, “It starts with a low hum that adheres itself to the underbelly of the hours like another dimension. Gradually, surreptitiously, the noise swells to a bellowing bass line, until it drowns out the symphony of life. It can last for days or months or entire seasons of being.”
It visited Keats frequently in his short life, leaving him with “a mind empty of ideas and hands heavy as lead.” It rendered Lorraine Hansberry “cold, useless, frustrated, helpless, disillusioned, angry and tired.”
In a particularly vivid vignette from the period just before he finally sought help, Bruce Springsteen writes: my depression is spewing like an oil spill all over the beautiful turquoise-green gulf of my last living part of me.