Live, think - and take medicines

"Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own."
Arthur Schopenhauer


The only small book I read by Schopenhauer says a lot about my reading therapy, the one I often submerge myself in. When I'm reading, I don't have to think - and, as a consequence, I hide from my feelings and unsolved questions. The longer the book, the better. Who else has read Trinity and Pillars of the Earth and London and The fist of God a couple of times each?

Then I thought that I should keep on reading, sure, but philosophy stuff, books that would make me think and books that would help me enjoy writing again.

And then I realized that thinking, like writing, demands continuity. It must be a habit. There I was, helping D. Diva to label wine bottles, with plenty of time to think - but unable to. As Schopenhauer said, you can sit and read any time you want, but you cannot sit and think. Or stand and think. It just doesn't work like that.

Yesterday I was looking for information about Schopenhauer when I came across a text about his (debatable) depression problem, which I read with great interest (and, stupid, forgot to bookmark it...). The question was: would he have produced the kind of literature he did had he lived in the XXI century? Would his pessimism be diagnosed as depression? Would he be medicated with Prozac or any similar drug? And, most important, would the drugs change him, change his way of seeing things, his rational process? Very good questions.

Questions which I ask myself. What kind of person have I become after a couple of years on antidepressants? Have these drugs given me back the will of living, the strength to face life's daily challenge? Or have they only anaesthetized me, transforming the person who cried a lot but also laughed a lot into some kind of zombie?

Three deaths in one month, of people who were important to me some way or another, and I have not shed a tear...