High-level creative exchange depends on both hierarchical and fluid power relationships.
In a modern dictionary, the noun melancholy has two definitions. First, it means thoughtful or gentle sadness.
Another well-known study, led by Nancy Andreasen, used structured interviews and matched control groups to examine thirty writers at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Eighty percen...
Today, many people not only take the self for granted but struggle mightily to connect it to anything larger. In Lincoln’s time, the idea of the self had the power—tinged with uncertainty, even with d...
Lincoln was raised in the thick of Old School Calvinism. In Kentucky and Indiana, his parents belonged to a fire-breathing sect called Separate Baptism, in which congregants heard—in the tradition of...
Perhaps, observes James McPherson, McClellan’s career had been too successful. He had never known . . . the despair of defeat or the humiliation of failure. He had never learned the lessons of adversi...
At the same time that self-made entered the nation’s lexicon, so did the notion of abject failure. Once reserved to describe a discrete financial episode—I made a failure, a merchant would say after l...
As president, he explained why he would pardon soldiers who deserted for cowardice: It would frighten the poor devils to death to shoot them.
Am loth to close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies, but fellow countrymen and brethren friends. We must not be enemies. AlThough passion may have has strained, it must not break our bonds o...
Yet, to the wigwam audience in Decatur, Lincoln presented a strange figure. He didn’t seem euphoric, or triumphant, or even pleased. To the contrary, said a man named Johnson, observing from the conve...
Though major depression is often associated with lethargy to the point of being frozen, many people with chronic depression not only work well but devote more energy to their vocation than to any othe...
As the psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison writes, There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that, compared to ‘normal’ individuals, artists, writers, and creative people in general are both psycholo...
ONE OF THE REASONS that depression is so problematic—and deadly, leading to many of the forty thousand suicides in the United States each year—is that people are often loath to admit they are sufferin...
In 1779, Jefferson proposed, for his state of Virginia, a guarantee of equality for citizens of all beliefs, and nonbeliefs—meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, Jefferson wrote, t...
No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character, declared his colleague Henry Whitney, was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy. His law partner William Herndon said, His m...
I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not I am sure they will not be broken...
And he was moved by the contrast with his own condition. A free man, relatively prosperous, just ending five weeks in luxury’s lap, and he was quite unhappy. The slaves, treated abominably, at least s...
Creeping fear of madness often accompanies depression. Sufferers wonder if their black moods will ever lift, or if their feelings of alienation from the healthy world will deepen and widen. These fear...
The American tradition of separation of church and state grew directly from the freethinking of the Founders. After political independence, they considered independence of thought and belief a logical...
Because of them, he worked all the harder in his thirties and forties to make himself, emotionally as well as materially, and go on to do the special work he longed for. Perseverance and forbearance b...
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