Saturday, June 6, 2009

Tim Kreider

I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best ones, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. It’s easy now to dismiss that year [after surviving a near-death experience] as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d experience after being clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace. It’s like the revelation I had when I was a kid the first time I ever flew in an airplane: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold onto and take back with you when you descend once more beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/reprieve/