The Silent Stars

Many maintain that failing young is a godsend. It tends to produce success in the long run.

Consider, conversely, the experience of Jack Kerouac. A small-town boy from Lowell Massachusetts, from a poor petit-bourgeois French Canadian family, he snared a football scholarship to Columbia. In those days, Columbia was a football as well as an academic powerhouse. Without campaigning, he was elected vice president of his sophomore class. Ivy League, a star halfback, and a student leader.

And then, one night, he looked up at the stars. And they were not impressed. “I suddenly realized that all my ambitions, no matter how they came out… wouldn’t matter anyway in the intervening space between human breathings and the sigh of the happy stars… It just didn’t matter what I did, anytime, anywhere, with anyone” (Jack’s Book, p. 27).

Exactly so.

Welcome to the essential insight of depression.

And the problem is that it is perfectly true.

Kerouac dropped out of Columbia and started writing. He became a religious seeker. And he died, essentially of alcoholism, at 47.

Now here’s the puzzle: who is more to be pitied? Kerouac, who saw through it all and never recovered, and clearly suffered horribly, or the vast majority of people who go through life never realizing that it is meaningless?

Personally, I pity more the latter; the non-depressives.

But I do believe there is another, happier alternative. One that Kerouac came close to, but never fully embraced. The experience of nothingness is the essential experience that makes an artist. But it is also the essential experience that makes a saint. It is the dark night of the soul.

Failing young is a curse. It makes you believe in things.