Anne Hedonia

"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall," wrote G.M. Hopkins. Which is true enough. But what he didn't say is that the mind also has plains: long stretches of blank flatness. For these periods of depressing sameness—marked by neither highs nor lows—psychology has given us the apt term "anhedonia." The absence of pleasure. The absence of joy. 

I was feeling that way lately. It was a spell of melancholia connected to restlessness in my job and—who woulda thought?—seems to have been worsened rather than improved by reading Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. Turns out, that is a dangerous novel to pick up when one is in one's early thirties and doesn't know what to do next with one's career. 

One thing he mentions in the book is a feeling of emptiness. "I didn't have the right to exist," he remarks at one point (Alexander trans.) I too felt myself floating through the week like a kind of specter. I texted a friend about it, and I thought of the word to describe what I was experiencing: anhedonia. 

We decided that it sounded very much like a place: something that would appear in the Phantom Tollbooth. Or perhaps The Pilgrim's Progress. Just as there could be the Doldrums, or the Slough of Despond, so too there must be the Plains of Anhedonia, marked out on some map of the mind's bluer states. 

It also lent itself to music: "Hail, Anhedonia" would be the anthem, sung to the tune of "God Bless America."

But ultimately we decided that Anhedonia was best understood through personification, rather than as a physical location. 

She was known by the name Anne Hedonia, and she was a friend nobody wanted to invite around. She was, after all, a bit of a downer. And once she showed up, it was terribly hard to get rid of her. It's like: "Okay, thanks for complementing the experience of reading Sartre, but I've finished the book now; you can leave!"

Late last night, waking up at 3 in the morning, it also occurred to me that Anne Hedonia seldom travels alone. She usually arrives in the company of her brother, Insomnia. These two ghastly twins show up together and peer in at you close, particularly when you are tossing and turning late at night trying to find sleep. 

And so, in the middle of the night, a mental image came to me. It was of two abstract figures with blank faces, set against a blurred dark-green landscape. It was a picture of Anne and her brother, coming to pay an unwanted visit. 

The image had, in my mind, the striking colors, expressionist and Symbolist aura of an Edvard Munch painting—as well as his characteristic, scarcely placeable sense of the uncanny—something like Munch's "Summer Night's Dream (The Voice)," which Karl Ove Knausgaard describes in his book on the Norwegian painter as almost inexplicably frightening and eerie. 

I got out of bed, and, since sleep wasn't happening anyways, I tried to create on my computer what I could see so clearly in my mind's eye. What emerged was not a perfect copy of what I had in my head; but then, it probably never is. 

As David Mamet once put it, speaking of a different form of artistic creation: the key is "accepting the resulting draft [...], rather than bemoaning [...] the difference between the draft and the (actually nonexistent) ideal foreseen version[.]"

And so, heeding this advice, I give you my creation as it actually is: "Insomnia and Anhedonia."