Depression is a lifting of the veil, what I saw when I was right down, was, I believed, what was actually there to be seen. Intolerable blankness. It could not be lived with long term, but from time to time I had to look at it, to know what was really there. When things looked better, I should keep a memory of how I had seen them in other, less protected moods. I thought that was vital. I still do. My attraction to blankness, to oblivion, was just as Melville described it, a sense that at source absence was everything. Colour was light and made the world livable in, but from time to time it was necessary to get back to the blank reality. Depression is not good for one, it's an anguish I can do without. But the hunger for blankness could be assuaged, perhaps, in other ways. While walls, staring into peopleless landscapes, heading for the snow and ice. Not to stay, but to be in it for a while. Death, of course, as Melville knows, is what it is. A toying with the void that finally toys with us. In the face of the waiting I can't escape, I head straight for its image and rest there for a while.
Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica (London: Virago, 1997), 182-3.
