Keep It Fake by Eric G. Wilson

Author:Eric G. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374709471
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

33.

In April 1870, when he was twenty-eight, William James, already deep in a debilitating depression, a symptom of what he later termed the sickness of soul, underwent an hallucination as harrowing as any horror story.

I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other[.] THAT SHAPE AM I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear.

The moment broke James’s life in two. After the incident, he continues,

the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone.

Those of us afflicted with chronic depression (the doctors call it clinical, as if it were taking place or could be cured in a sanitary white large room) have suffered such moments of our own, but rarely have our horrors (I have had one) borne the burden of being the same ghoulish vision, almost to the detail, that our own fathers endured.

When William had been in the world for two and a half years—and his brother Henry thirteen months—the father, also named Henry, had a horrific collapse of his own. This was in May 1844, when the family was living in a cottage near Windsor, England, called Frogmore. Thirty years later, Henry Sr. recalled the terror:

[H]aving eaten a comfortable dinner, I remained sitting at the table after the family had dispersed, idly gazing at the embers in the grate, thinking of nothing, and feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion,

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