the dark year

[jazzfish]

Noting for posterity:

So I call it in my mind: the dark year.

To try to tell it is like trying to tell the passage of a sleepless night. Nothing happens. One thinks, and dreams briefly, and wakes again; fears loom and pass, and ideas won't come clear, and meaningless words haunt the mind, and the shudder of nightmare brushes by, and time seems not to move, and it's dark, and nothing happens.

--Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts

Le Guin's speaking of grief, there, but it's also the best description of depression I've seen since Dar Williams's "After All".

Comments

[wohali]

Wow, I have to agree. I haven't read that LeGuin story yet, but now I am sure to.

And YAY Dar Williams! I have seen her twice in concert at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival!

[jazzfish]

Novel. :) Three YA novels: Gifts, Voices, Powers: the Annals of the Western Shore. I've just reread Gifts and it's still very good, and I recall the other two as being even better. And Le Guin does loneliness in text in a way that very few other writers can get.

ooh, Falcon Ridge! *envious* I was a huge Dar fan for, oh, most of the first decade of the millennium. Her music's kind of all wrapped up in unpleasant-relationship memories now so I don't listen to it as much as I once did, and I'm not so fond of her more recent albums. But when she's good... yowza.

[wohali]

Honesty Room is the album I listen to the most. Stunning the energy that went into that one. And I agree I don't like her recent stuff as much.

YA novels? I can get behind that.

[jazzfish]

Every Dar album up to and including The Green World has at one time been My Favorite Dar Album. I think it's settled down into either Honesty Room (Travelling II, You're Aging Well, Mark Rothko Song <3;) or Mortal City... but Mortal City has "February" which is just about the saddest song possible, so it doesn't get broken out very often.

Partway through Voices now, and these deserve to be as widely-known and -read as the Earthsea books, I think.