The Text is Dead - Long Live the Text

I've decided to alternate between writing related blogs and spiritual/cultural related blogs, as part of my at least one blog a week New Year's Resolution. So this is my first writing-related blog and it's on the need to edit things out, and my struggle with a particularly difficult passage.

My MC is suffering from depression at the start of the novel, and much like Dostoyevsky's The Idiot - I want to describe this but without actually being depressive.

So I'm just going to post the excerpt below. I definitely want to take out most of this, if not all of it, but the part at the end where he has the epiphany, I like that part a lot. It may have to go with the rest, but I'm trying to think how to cut this drastically but maybe still keep part of it. And then I laugh at myself, because - I don't necessarily want to give up this passage FOREVER like suicide, but do want to look at the underlying causes for its melange and maybe rehabilitate it so as to be productive in the society of the rest of my novel...

For the rest of the summer, Robert explored the forest and the sea, never wandering very far, feeling as if he were turning into some kind of hermit or mystic, the kind of person who claimed all the mysteries of the universe could be found in a single leaf fallen from a single tree or some such nonsense. Until now, he had never put much thought into such things. Now, he wondered if mystics were failed children like himself, left behind by a world which had become so interested in progress, in the new and extraordinary that it could never seem to be satisfied with the everyday and close at hand.

While brooding and not wondering what his friends were up to, because he knew they were having stupid and random fun, Robert read articles on his paper. While reading one of many articles, while alone in his home Robert found out that although it was no longer possible to die, it was still possible to fall into clinical depression.  And that was what seemed to be happening to him. According to the articles, he should look for some help. But, he did not want to. He really did not want to talk to anyone, and that seemed unfair.

Robert sat on his porch, in the midst of a warm and sunny day, not a cloud above, the air so clear that barely a wisp of breeze moved. The world felt beautiful, tranquil – and dead. It was a lot like how he felt inside.

Like everyone in the world, he had been given his paper as soon as he was old enough to read, which had been three years old, because – his parents told him – he had been a bit slow. Most kids started reading long before then. That was the year before he had started school, when he was four.  They had showed him how to use it. He could still remember sitting with his mother on the sofa, her hair falling over her arm, brushing it as she showed him where to press, how to navigate the menus. From this handy device, he could access all kinds of information.

He was even able to look up things like “parents leaving” and “twelve years old” and almost no one had written anything about it. That’s how unusual it was. Out of billions of people, he had to be the oddball, the one who experienced some freak occurrence almost no one did anymore, although formerly when earth was new, people had. But that was completely different. And as for recent incidents, the few stories he had found, it had been a mutual decision and was mentioned only as being sad, too bad they could not stay together.

What he did find out was that people who were all alone, had no hobbies, and had lost touch with the outside world and one another were liable to fall into clinical depression. As far as Robert could make out, this was because God had designed people much like rocks, such that a person in motion tended to stay in motion, but people at rest tended to stay at rest. After a while like that, their physical bodies became used to stillness and their emotions became damaged and then before very long it was difficult, if not impossible, for them to do anything.

He even tried to say that out loud, to be funny. “People in motion tend to stay in motion, but people at rest tend to stay at rest.”

But it was not funny. There was nothing funny about this at all. Apparently it was a fact of their human bodies that if people were alone for too long they became sad and lonely and felt cut off. There were even groups of people talking about this, support groups. But that would have meant admitting he had a problem.

And this was not Robert’s fault. So instead, he sat on his porch, biting his lip, running his fingertip across the paper and feeling its smooth surface.

Clinical Depression.

In a way that alone made him feel a little better. There was a name for it, and as it said near the bottom of the list of symptoms, it meant he might have “suicidal thoughts.” He had not had any before this, but now he did. In fact, that was the best way to describe. Here he was, in the perfect world, no more sin, no more death.

And he wanted to die. Robert wanted to die.

He wanted to scream out to heaven, wanted to tear down his house with his bare hands, wanted to be able to express what was inside of him in some kind of immensely self-destructive manner. Why wouldn’t God let him die?

Robert sat on the porch, put down his paper, and really thought about that. Everyone thought eternal life was a blessing, a really great and super thing. But what if it wasn’t? What if for people like him, hopelessly stained by something that wasn’t even his fault, for something that was done to him, it was a punishment. God would force him to live what that mark on his soul forever. In fact there was no if. It was happening to him right now. “I want to die,” he said, half-expecting an answer, for a voice from heaven to shout, ‘No.’ Nothing happened and the silence was worse. The silence was God’s way of saying He, or She, did not care. Robert’s prayer was not even worth listening to, let alone responding.

“I. Want. To. Die.” He said it again, louder. There was still no answer. “I want to die!” he shouted.

There was not even anyone close enough to hear him. It was summer. Swan was virtually deserted and would be for the next month. “I want to die. I want to die. I want to die.” He said it over and over. There was still nothing, no response, only silence.

Not even a hint of breeze stirred the warm summer day, as if the world were holding its breath, waiting to say something. But there was only nothing. Not a whisper of movement. Nothing.

“I really mean it,” he said. And then, he thought he felt – something, as if a tiny voice were speaking into the dry and barren day. It might have been just his imagination. It was not a sound. But he thought he felt someone say, or convey without words, the briefest of answers. Just two words seemed to capture the answer he felt brushing against his mind.

“I know,” the voiceless voice seemed to say. And then, nothing.

Robert went very still, as if suddenly afraid the slightest movement or action would break the moment. He was even afraid the voice might be about to kill him, to take him at his word and kill him. And, if so, he hoped that he could explain first, could maybe work out some terms of agreement wherein he got to do a few things more before he died. He held his breath, afraid even to breathe, until he could not take anymore. He exhaled, harshly, breathed in again, then said, “Okay, maybe not right this second.”

To his surprise, the sound of his own voice and the tension he had felt for a brief second actually made him laugh. He had actually been afraid that maybe God was listening and might kill him. And, okay, that was weird and surreal. But, also, oddly enough, funny.

End excerpt. This passage needs help. I don't want to put a bullet in it and let it die..