Love is simultaneous mutual regulation, wherein each person meets the needs of the other, because neither can provide for his own. - Thomas Lewis

Like any other momentous shift in emotion, depression is not an occupation by a foreign army; it is civil insurrection, the subversion of identity's republic from within. A depressed person loses more than energy and appetite — he loses himself and the capacity to make the decisions his former, pre-coup self would have made.

Walker Percy wrote that “modern man is estranged from being, from his own being, from the being of other creatures in the world, from transcendent being. He has lost something — what, he does not know; he only knows that he is sick unto death with the loss of it.” The mysterious, absent element is a deep and abiding immersion in communal ties. In all of its varied and protean forms, love is the tether binding our whirling lives.

Our society’s love affair with mechanical devices that respond at a button-touch ill prepares us to deal with the unruly organic mind that dwells within. Anything that does not comply must be broken or poorly designed, people now suppose, including their hearts.