Be Passionate About Others

Peter Kramer's new book 'About Depression' has also received attention here and from NYT.

Laura Miller's review at salon.com is generating a fair bit of discussion in these blogs:
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

"During my attacks I feel a coward before the pain and suffering- more of a coward than I ought, and it is perhaps this very moral cowardice which, while formerly I had no desire to get better, makes me now eat like two, work hard ..."

What drove van Gogh?

"Either in figure or in landscape I should wish to express not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow."

"In short, I want to reach so far that people will say of my work:

He feels deeply, he feels tenderly, notwithstanding my so-called roughness, perhaps because of this..."

"This is my ambition, which is ... founded less on anger than on love, founded more on serenity than on passion. It is true that I am often in the greatest misery, but still there is within me a calm pure harmony and music."

"In the poorest huts, in the dirtiest corner, I see drawings and pictures. And with irresistible force my mind is drawn towards such things."

Don't be be passionate about your pain. Instead, be passionate about your work, if not about others.