These days, confide to someone that you are in despair and he or she will likely suggest that you seek out professional help for your depression. While despair used to be classified as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been medicalized and folded into the concept of clinical depression. If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video, he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair.

There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished everything on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact, a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”

- courtesy Gordon Marino for the NYTIMES

The seasons send their ruins as they go,
For in spring the narciss shows its head
Nor withers till the rose has flamed to red,
And in autumn purple violets blow,
And the slim crocus stirs the winter snow;
Wherefore yon leafless trees will bloom again
And this gray land grow green with summer rain
And send up cowslips for some boy to mow.

But what of life whose bitter hungry sea
Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night
Covers the days which never more return?
Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn
We all lose too soon, and only find delight
In withered husks of some dead memory

:::

THE THINGS WE DID LAST SUMMER
(Sammy Cahn / Jule Styne)

Frank Sinatra – 1946

The boat rides we would take, the moonlight on the lake
The way we danced and hummed our fav’rite song
The things we did last summer I’ll remember all winter long

The midway and the fun, the kewpie dolls we won
The bell I rang to prove that I was strong
The things we did last summer I’ll remember all winter long

The early morning hike, the rented tandem bike
The lunches that we used to pack
We never could explain that sudden summer rain
The looks we got when we got back

The leaves began to fade like promises we made
How could a love that seemed so right go wrong?
The things we did last summer I’ll remember all winter long

I’ve tried so to forget, at times I do, and yet
The mem’ry of you lingers like our song
The things we did last summer, I’ll remember all winter long

“I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.”
- Albert Camus

check them out here: JAZZ MUSICIAN PASSPORT PHOTOS

“For the movement of faith must be made continually on the strength of the absurd…I for my part can indeed describe the movements of faith, but I cannot perform them. When learning how to make swimming movements, one may be said to describe the movements all right but one isn’t swimming; likewise I can describe the movements of faith but when I am thrown into the water I make other movements, I make movements of infinity, while faith does the opposite, having performed the movements of infinity it makes those of finitude.”
- Soren Kierkegaard, on discussing faith compared to actually practicing.