I'm ashamed to say I was in bed at 10.45 last night, nearly asleep, when the phone rang. It was my son. I heard him say, "Obama's dead!" and shot up in bed.
"What??" I screamed.
"Osama bin Laden," he said.
What a difference. My main thought, on hearing of the death at the hands of American forces, was that this will be good for Obama's presidency. And then I went back to sleep.
Here's an excerpt of an article about journals, about the diary of Sir Walter Scott:
Over a period of six years, the journal became a crucial outlet for the feelings of despair—the "cold sinkings of the heart"—that had agonized him from the time of his youth. "Is it the body brings it on the mind or the mind inflicts it upon the body?" he wondered, concluding that the two are inseparable: "I fancy I might as well enquire whether the fiddle or the fiddlestick makes the tune."
Scott found that the only effective remedy for depression was physical exertion. "Fighting with this fiend is not always the best was to conquer him," he wrote. "I have always found exercize and the open air better than reasoning." His long walks often led to dramatic emotional recovery: "The freshness of the air, the singing of the birds, the beautiful aspect of nature, the size of the venerable trees, gave me all a delightful feeling this morning. It seemd there was pleasure even in living and breathing without anything else."
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