That place

 Scott Russell Sanders writes about place, including that place. It’s the place you go to in the middle of the night, sleepless because you are not only lost but you have lost your bearings, your way of determining direction. 

Surely the place you know I am talking about. You have skidded down the slope toward oblivion, for shorter or longer stays. And so you realize the pit is not a gap in something solid, like a hole in rock, but the absence of all solidity, the square root of nowhere and nothing. I go there too often, never willingly, usually dragged from bed by the scruff of my neck.

 

I came to Sanders’s essays because I’m interested in natural places, but I recognized the place he’s talking about. Sanders says we think of some places as shelters. We turn some shelters into sanctuaries, but even the sanctuary of a home won’t protect us from fear.

Sanders is describing the fear of oblivion. It strikes me as a remarkable description of depression.

• Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 40.