The Great Stupor; or the depravity of a gluttonous rodent

No, I would not like to play another game of spider solitaire, you arrogant automated prompt, but I will take a quick peek at my statistics so that I might know the abstract measure of my progress. And it's not so good, indeed, it's very bad. While the world turns, and people welcome babies and bid farewell to the dead, my record with spider solitaire sits at a measly 10% of games won. Let me punch the numbers for a minute... carry the 7, divided by the variance of equal rotundity across the southern axis... yes, one minute more... multiplied by the slightly diminished power of 'W'... rooted by the inverse bulbousness of a chipmunk's cheeks..., I have it now, that makes 10% of games won, 90% games lost. Embarrassing really. Well, I do play it at its most challenging, that's right, all four suits. Yeah, I know, that's kind of awesome, awesome like Sarah Palin's presence in the public sphere. "How is this possible!?" one might fairly inquire.

But enough of my dominance of a venerable microsoft time waister, on to other things, important things, dare I claim alternative things? I'm wondering about something I read recently about sickness and depravity. The quote goes something like, "Illness and despair are often only forms of depravity." The words are attributed to a fictional character, Lodovico Settembrini, in a book of fiction, The Magic Mountain, written by the flesh-and-blood, decidedly nonfictional writer Thomas Mann. So Mann has Settembrini talking with the book's supposed hero, probably an anti-hero if one were to be pretentious about it, Hans Castorp, when he says, I repeat, "Illness and despair are often only forms of depravity." Hmm. I think he's right, at least from my particular view, singular in the sense of one brain/one consciousness, not in the sense of inimitableness, if you catch my sense.

My own bouts with despair regularly leave me feeling tainted and hollow, shamed somehow. I sit at the end of the day, perched on my daily labors of procrastination and regret, and I say to myself, "Woe is me." But so ordinary has this routine become, I don't need the words themselves to pronounce on my woe, for they merely abstractly signify something much more viscerally felt, in my bones and blood. So more often than not, I do not say, "Woe is me," rather I say nothing, but instead feel my woes and do not think them or about them. But like my ongoing love affair with spider solitaire, this is becoming deeply redundant. I'm at a loss, and not satisfied with it. Let's return to the magic mountain to see what happens.

Eventually Mann has the fictional Castorp rejoining, "But illness as a form of depravity? Which means, not that it arises from depravity, but is itself depravity? Now that's a paradox." Hmm, good point Mann via Castorp, though I agree with Mann via Settembrini who goes on to counter, "Paradox is the poison flower of quietism, the iridescent sheen of a putrefied mind, the greatest depravity of all(!)." I have added the exclamation mark to modernize the text, but even without my editing the final parry by Settembrini slaps me across the face, and the many nuts and legumes which I was storing in my capacious cheeks are violently expelled, glistening with saliva, making a disgusting mess of the place.

Yes! The paradox of my dissatisfaction with the daily grind of nothing special, and my robust reluctance to change, itself constitutes my place among the highest orders of depravity! Therein lies the source of my weather-worn ennui, my predictable gloom! Yes, as it is with the host of fictional characters who populate Mann's fictional sanatorium for the wealthy and privileged, despair is a form of depravity, in our cases at least. Like them, my despair is completely self-originating, it begins deep from within myself, from my spurious self-analysis onto tendentious and specious claims about myself (all italicized adjectives are here meant to stand for 'false'). It's true, any despair I feel is a sign of the depraved depths into which I have dug myself. But, lo! What's this!?

I have my trusty ladder constructed out of that eternal well-spring of will, of self control and direction. It appears before my eyes as thoughts of personal responsibility and dignity grow from vague whispers to loud exclamations cascading out of my recently emptied mouth. No more will this maw choke itself on regrettable regrets and shameful shames.

No more illness for e. herzen,
which is to say no more despair.
I'll immediately get to the healing,
first a game of solitaire.