Free The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon Page B

felt utterly, devastatingly lonely and entirely betrayed. We had a few months (she wasn’t sure how many; it turned out to be more than a year) to work on closure before her retirement became effective.
    Later that month, I complained to the selfsame analyst that a loss of feeling, a numbness, had infected all my human relations. I didn’t care about love; about my work; about family; about friends. My writing slowed, then stopped. “I know nothing,” the painter Gerhard Richter once wrote. “I can do nothing. I understand nothing. I know nothing. Nothing. And all this misery does not even make me particularly unhappy.” So I too found all strong emotion gone, except for a certain nagging anxiety. I had always had a headstrong libido that had often led me into trouble; it seemed to have evaporated. I felt none of my habitual yearning for physical/emotional intimacy and was not attracted either to people in the streets or to those I knew and had loved; in erotic circumstances, my mind kept drifting off to shopping lists and work I needed to do. This gave me a feeling that I was losing my self, and that scared me. I made a point of scheduling pleasures into my life. During the spring of 1994, I went to parties and tried and failed to have fun; I saw friends and tried and failed to connect; I bought expensive things I’d wanted in the past and had no satisfaction from them; and I pushed on with previously untried extremes to reawaken my libido, attending pornographic films and in extremis soliciting prostitutes for their services. I was not particularly horrified by any of these new behaviors, but I was also unable to get any pleasure, or even release, from them. My analyst and I discussed the situation: I was depressed. We tried to get to the root of the problem while I felt the disconnect slowly but relentlessly increasing. I began to complain that I was overwhelmed by the messages on my answering machineand I fixated on that: I saw the calls, often from friends, as an impossible weight. Every time I returned the calls, more would come in. I had also become afraid of driving. When I drove at night, I couldn’t see the road, and my eyes kept going dry. I constantly thought I was going to swerve into the barrier or into another car. I would be in the middle of the highway and suddenly I would realize that I didn’t know how to drive. In consternation, I would pull over to the side of the road in a cold sweat. I began to spend weekends in the city to avoid having to drive. My analyst and I ran through the history of my anxious blues. It occurred to me that my relationship with my girlfriend had ended because of an earlier stage of depression, though I knew it was also possible that the end of that relationship had helped to cause the depression. As I worked on that knot, I kept redating the beginning of the depression: since the breakup; since my mother’s death; since the beginning of my mother’s two-year illness; since the end of a previous relationship; since puberty; since birth. Soon, I could not think of a time or a behavior that was not symptomatic. Still, what I was experiencing was only neurotic depression, characterized more by anxious sorrow than by madness. It appeared to be within my control; it was a sustained version of something I had suffered before, something familiar at one level or another to many healthy people. Depression dawns as gradually as adulthood.
    In June 1994, I began to be constantly bored. My first novel was published in England, and yet its favorable reception did little for me. I read the reviews indifferently and felt tired all the time. In July, back home in New York, I found myself burdened by social events, even by conversation. It all seemed like more effort than it was worth. The subway proved intolerable. My analyst, who was not yet retired, said that I was suffering from a slight depression. We discussed reasons, as though to name the beast would be to tame it. I knew too many