Indeed, nothing less than the understanding of God’s earth was in flux. For centuries, the church had censored scientific ideas that were contrary to Christian doctrine. When censorship ended, new que...
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...
That solitude promotes insight as well as change, Storr continues, has been recognized by the great religious leaders—including the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed—who have usually retreated from the worl...
People expected too much, pushed themselves too hard, and therefore brought strains upon their minds that they were constitutionally incapable of withstanding.
From a young age, Lincoln experienced psychological pain and distress, to the point that he believed himself temperamentally inclined to suffer to an unusual degree. He learned how to articulate his s...
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...
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...
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...
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...
How true it is that ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,’ or in other words, that He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable...
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 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...
As president, he explained why he would pardon soldiers who deserted for cowardice: It would frighten the poor devils to death to shoot them.
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...
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...
The suffering he had endured lent him clarity, discipline, and faith in hard times—perhaps especially in hard times.
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...
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...