The Second Coming

I
    THE FIRST SIGN that something had gone wrong manifested itself while he was playing golf.
    Or rather it was the first time he admitted to himself that something might be wrong.
    For some time he had been feeling depressed without knowing why. In fact, he didn’t even realize he was depressed. Rather was it the world and life around him which seemed to grow more senseless and farcical with each passing day.
    Then two odd incidents occurred on the golf course.
    Once he fell down in a bunker. There was no discernible reason for his falling. One moment he was standing in the bunker with his sand-iron appraising the lie of his ball. The next he was lying flat on the ground. Lying there, cheek pressed against the earth, he noticed that things looked different from this unaccustomed position. A strange bird flew past. A cumulus cloud went towering thousands of feet into the air. Ordinarily he would not have given the cloud a second glance. But as he gazed at it from the bunker, it seemed to turn purple and gold at the bottom while the top went boiling up higher and higher like the cloud over Hiroshima. Another time, he sliced out-of-bounds, something he seldom did. As he searched for the ball deep in the woods, another odd thing happened to him. He heard something and the sound reminded him of an event that had happened a long time ago. It was the most important event in his life, yet he had managed until that moment to forget it.
    Shortly afterwards, he became even more depressed. People seemed more farcical than ever. More than once he shook his head and, smiling ironically, said to himself: This is not for me.
    Then it was that it occurred to him that he might shoot himself.
    First, it was only a thought that popped into his head.
    Next, it was an idea which he entertained ironically.
    Finally, it was a course of action which he took seriously and decided to carry out.
    The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people’s lives were, they generally gave no sign of it. Why was it that it was he not they who had decided to shoot himself? How did they manage to deceive themselves and even appear to live normally, work as usual, play golf, tell jokes, argue politics? Was he crazy or was it rather the case that other people went to any length to disguise from themselves the fact that their lives were farcical? He couldn’t decide.
    What is one to make of such a person?
    To begin with: though it was probably the case that he was ill and that it was his illness—depression—which made the world seem farcical, it is impossible to prove the case.
    On the one hand, he was depressed.
    On the other hand, the world is in fact farcical.
    Or at least it is possible to make the case that for some time now life has seemed to become more senseless, even demented, with each passing year.
    True, most people he knew seemed reasonably sane and happy. They played golf, kept busy, drank, talked, laughed, went to church, appeared to enjoy themselves, and in general were both successful and generous. Their talk made a sort of sense. They cracked jokes.
    On the other hand, perhaps it is possible, especially in strange times such as these, for an entire people, or at least a majority, to deceive themselves into believing that things are going well when in fact they are not, when things are in fact farcical. Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears.
    But surely it is fair to say that when a man becomes depressed, falls down in a sand trap, and decides to shoot himself, something has gone wrong with the man, not the world.
    If one person is depressed for every ninety-nine who are not or who say they are not, who is to say that the depressed person is right and the ninety-nine wrong, that they are deceiving themselves? Even if this were true, what good would it do to undeceive the ninety-nine who have diverted themselves with a busy round of work and play and so imagine themselves happy?
    The argument is abstract and useless.
    On the other hand, it is an undeniable fact that more people than ever are depressed nowadays. At last count, the symptom of depression outnumbered all other symptoms put together. What if the proportion of undepressed to depressed people changes from ninety-nine to one to fifty-fifty? Perhaps the argument will become less abstract.
    At any rate and regardless of who was or who was not demented, something odd