Other people can be annoying, as Sartre famously suggested, but true hell is perpetual imprisonment in the self. Many historians have argued that the rise of self-awareness starting in roughly the seventeenth century was associated with the outbreak of an epidemic of “melancholy” in Europe at about the same time, and subjective accounts of that disorder correspond very closely with what we now call “depression.”10 Chronic anxiety, taking the form of “neurasthenia” in the nineteenth century, seems to be another disease of modernism. The self that we love and nurture turns out to be a fragile,
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