A society is like an individual: in the face of a dark night it can either become defensive and avoid the challenge of new life, or it can reform itself and discover in the darkness where it has gone wrong.

No, you yourself have to take your life seriously. Feel its weight. Admit its complexity. And as Jungians would say, honor its shadows. Irony can come only from an awareness of the good and the bad, the successes and the failures, the areas of intelligence and the zones of folly and ignorance.

In the presence of a self deprecating person, it is often wise to look for signs of subtle control and almost invisible force.

Anatole Broyard complained that when his witty and irreverent friends visited him in the hospital, they were too serious and too extravagant with their good wishes. “They looked at me with a kind of grotesque lovingness in their faces,” he says. He didn’t like the falseness in their optimism. They had become emotional literalists, fundamentalist friends. They had set aside their wit because they couldn’t deal with Broyard’s situation as well as he could.

It’s helpful, then, during a dark night, to constantly broaden your imagination of what is happening to you. If your only idea is that you’re depressed, you will be at the mercy of the depression industry, which will treat you as one among millions, for whom there is only one canonical and approved story.