How Abraham Lincoln Drawn Poetry and Strength from His Suicidal Depression – The Marginalian

“Now I'm the saddest man alive,” Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809–April 15, 1865) wrote to a law colleague three weeks before his thirty-third birthday. If what I feel was spread equally throughout the human family, there would not be another happy face in the world.”

Thinking, sensitive, and compassionate by nature, Lincoln felt life deeply. As a child, he told his step-parents that the life of an ant is as good for an ant as ours is for us and he passionately scolded other boys for burning sea turtles for the thoughtless cruelty of children at play. As a teenager, he despised his family's tradition of considering a basic literacy education sufficient for their work, running away from his farm duties to read and study, so that his cousin would later remember him as “very lazy… As a young adult, he saw himself cursed with the “unusual misfortune” of dreaming dreams too big to explode with disappointment.

Five years after leaving his father's farm, the first burst of depression rocked the young man's country. His legal studies pushed him beyond his capacity. Studying day and night, he was thin. At that time, the typhoid epidemic swept the country with a great wave of death, accompanying the life of Ann Rutledge – a young woman who especially understood the sensitivity of Lincoln and cared for him deeply – so deeply that no one around them really understood the nature of their bond, although generations have taken the liberty of the appropriateness of my spathos of love around all the truths of love.

Whatever the secret truth of the relationship, it was during this period of conflict and loss, surrounded by widespread death and that went beyond his natural boundaries, that Lincoln came to seriously consider suicide. The idea grew so intense, it worked so hard that he no longer trusted himself to carry a pocket knife. Friends and neighbors watched his mind change with growing concern, and were so shocked to see him wandering the woods with his gun that they set a suicide watch.

Lincoln sat down. But from that time on, like Keats, like Tchaikovsky, he experienced repeated visits to fatal despair, the character-shaping power of which Joshua Wolf Shenk explores. Lincoln's Melancholy: How the Depression Challenged the President and Magnified Him (public library).

After that first public episode of suicide, Lincoln learned to hide his broken heart behind his famous joke, behind an unusual face that was so happy that even those who worked closest to him would never see him sad or angry. But it spilled carelessly, through a crack of pity: Trying to help his distressed friend with his great gift of consolation, he wrote with a sad familiarity “of that tension of thought, which will sometimes thread the sweetest mind and turn it to the bitterness of death.”

Unbeknownst to anyone, in the summer of his thirtieth year, Lincoln wrote a tragic poem titled “The Suicide's Soliloquy,” which was published anonymously in a small Whig paper in Illinois alongside advertisements for whale oil and French cologne. It would take scholars 139 years to identify him as a writer. With its haunting plot epigraph and its surprising narrative of a fictional character, it was Lincoln's way of safely practicing the darkest edges of his imagination what it would be like to commit the ultimate goal of suicide – the delusion that total self-abnegation is the only way to end mental anguish and nothing else.

SUICIDE OF SUICIDE

The following lines are said to have been found near the remains of a man who is said to have killed himself, in a deep forest, on a flat branch of the Sangamon, some time ago.

Here, there is a lonely owl
He sends forth his groans at midnight,
Fierce wolves will howl at my corpse,
Even if the locusts pick up my bones.

No one else will read my fate,
Or where my ashes lie;
Except when the animals are drawn by their bait,
Or with the cry of ravens.

Yes! I decided to do the deed,
And here is the place to do it:
This heart I will take out with a sword,
Even though I'm in hell I have to handle it!

Hell! What is hell for someone like me
Who does not know pleasures;
By friends woe betide you,
By hope have you been rejected again?

To be free this strength thinking,
That my chest is loud,
I will jump from the edge of hell,
And ride its waves.

Though the demons scream, and the chains burn
It may evoke long regrets;
Their terrible cries, and piercing pains,
You will help me forget it.

Yes! I prepared myself, in the endless night,
Taking that burning room!
Don't think of hell tales to be afraid
I, the world's outcast!

Sweet metal! come out of your shell,
And shine, speak thy might;
Break the limbs of my spirit,
And take my blood in showers!

I'm hitting! It vibrates in that heart
Which drives me to this;
I draw and kiss the bloody arrow,
Last but not least – my one friend!

This dark despair was more than a poetic image of Lincoln. Three years later, when another severe episode of depression overwhelmed him and he saw himself as the saddest person in the world, he reached a peak:

To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it seems to me.

He got better. He remembered what we often and dangerously forget when we are pressed under the lid of depression – that the light of existence returns. Like any great artist of life, Lincoln learned to turn his suffering into fuel to build a more beautiful and light-filled world, turning the secret sorrow of his depression into a powerful political metaphor to unite the spirit of his nation. “If destruction is our lot,” he said in one of his most powerful speeches, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. (Whitman – who revered Lincoln as “the greatest, best, most virtuous, artistic, and virtuous man” – echoes this view with redoubled conviction during the Civil War era in his later essay. Democratic Vistas: “America, if it deserves to fall and be destroyed at all, deserves it within itself, not without.”)

Living with his depression, Lincoln intimately understood that what is true of the human spirit is true of the human spirit – our constant setbacks offer an invitation to learn new ways of doing: to do good, to do purpose, to do the life we ​​want to live and the world we want to live in.

Couple with the great writers of two centuries – including Keats, Whitman, Thoreau, Carson, and Hansberry – in the definitive treatment of depression, and then revisit Tim Ferriss's how he survived suicidal depression, Mary Oliver's antidote and the best antidote to depression, William Styron's classic inner journey, and meditation on this way of thinking what it's really like. grief.