The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon Page B

when you affect the limbic system, which controls emotion, you also touch on memory. I remember that party only in ghostly outlines and washed-out colors: grey food, beige people, muddy light in the rooms. I do remember that I was sweating horribly during it, and that I was dying to leave. I tried to put it all down to stress. I was determined, at any cost, to keep up appearances, an impulse that was to serve me well. I did it: no one seemed to notice anything strange. I got through the evening.
    When I got home that night, I began to feel frightened. I lay in bed, not sleeping, hugging my pillow for comfort. Over the next two and a half weeks things got worse and worse. Shortly before my thirty-first birthday, I went to pieces. My whole system seemed to be caving in. I was not going out with anyone at the time. My father had volunteered to organize a birthday party for me, but I couldn’t bear the idea, and we had agreed instead to go to a favorite restaurant with four of my closest friends. On the day before my birthday, I left the house only once, to buy some groceries. On the way home from the store, I suddenly lost control of my lower intestine and soiled myself. I could feel the stain spreading as I hastened home. When I got in, I dropped the grocery bag, rushed to the bathroom, got undressed, and went to bed.
    I did not sleep much that night, and I could not get up the following day. I knew I could not go to any restaurant. I wanted to call my friends and cancel, but I couldn’t. I lay very still and thought about speaking, trying to figure out how to do it. I moved my tongue but there were no sounds. I had forgotten how to talk. Then I began to cry, but there wereno tears, only a heaving incoherence. I was on my back. I wanted to turn over, but I couldn’t remember how to do that either. I tried to think about it, but the task seemed colossal. I thought that perhaps I’d had a stroke, and then I cried again for a while. At about three o’clock that afternoon, I managed to get out of bed and go to the bathroom. I returned to bed shivering. Fortunately, my father called. I answered the phone. “You have to cancel tonight,” I said, my voice shaky. “What’s wrong?” he kept asking, but I didn’t know.
    There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth. With the depression, your vision narrows and begins to close down; it is like trying to watch TV through terrible static, where you can sort of see the picture but not really; where you cannot ever see people’s faces, except almost if there is a close-up; where nothing has edges. The air seems thick and resistant, as though it were full of mushed-up bread. Becoming depressed is like going blind, the darkness at first gradual, then encompassing; it is like going deaf, hearing less and less until a terrible silence is all around you, until you cannot make any sound of your own to penetrate the quiet. It is like feeling your clothing slowly turning into wood on your body, a stiffness in the elbows and the knees progressing to a terrible weight and an isolating immobility that will atrophy you and in time destroy you.
    My father came down to my apartment with a friend of mine, trailing my brother and his fiancée. Fortunately, my father had keys. I had had nothing to eat in almost two days, and they tried to get me to eat a little soup. Everyone thought that I must have some kind of terrible virus. I ate a few bites, then threw up all over myself. I