White is grateful for his depression in its degree and frequency. It reminds him how closely happiness gets entangled with culture and community, personal meaning and purpose. Depression severs those tangled connections.

Without connection he feels the lonely ache, until he sits or walks or swims and is suddenly reminded there is a unique pleasure when loosened from the social and the self, when cut from their preconditions. The pleasure feels more pure and more free. White is grateful for depression to remind him of this pleasure as pleasure in itself. He is reminded until he forgets again and grasps outward again until depression again returns like a cutting wind.

He likes the winds that cut, and yet he must admit he’s never had the tempestuous depression that cuts one from the feeling of Life, not connection with culture or community, but the big strong feeling that there is a thing called Life and he is Life as much as anything is. He’s never been so cut off, hopes never to. His heart for those who have and are.