One afternoon of my sophomore year in college my bicycle was stolen. For reasons I no longer can reconstruct, I decided not to buy another used bike, but henceforth to hitchhike to class. I met many interesting people this way: Professors, sex therapists, construction workers, mothers who wanted to recruit boyfriends for their daughters and the like. My goal for these trips to and fro campus was to strike up a conversation with every single person I met. Would I be able to get everyone to tell me a bit of his or her personal story? I did, indeed, manage to strike a conversation with all my lifters except for a man who I came to refer as the unhappiest person in the world. My efforts to get him to talk went nowhere. When I recounted this peculiar hitchhiking experience to a physicist turned psychotherapist, who gave me a lift a few days later, he explained that the man was probably clinically depressed.

He suggested that I read a book by a gifted writer who beautifully described what goes in the mind of a clinically depressed person.

Many years later I may have finally stumbled upon this book when I picked up a copy of William Styron