Inns of Molten Blue

My first husband, Leonard Feldstein, who has been dead almost a quarter of a century, used to say, when I was feeling blue, “Make a study of your depression, Beck. Learn everything you can about it.” Len was a psychiatrist and philosopher as well as a relentlessly cheerful polymath: he was interested in aesthetics, alchemy, astronomy, Alexander the Great, Anglo-Saxon England, and Aristotle…and that’s just a sampling of his passions beginning with the letter ‘a.’ I am neither so accomplished nor so erudite. But I have suffered from depression for most of my adult life, and have learned a good deal about it along the way. And I love the color blue: practically every item of clothing I own is blue, leading one acquaintance to ask whether my underwear is blue! My friends think I’m dotty, but I point out that Emily Dickinson wore only white in her latter years. In middle life, if one can’t have one’s idiosyncracies (what my mother, who died four years ago of complications from Type II Diabetes, called “idiotsyncracies”), then what can one have? Certainly not that third glass of Blue Label Chardonnay, that oversized blueberry muffin, or multiple snack packs of Terra Blue Potato Chips, which used to be given out liberally on Jet Blue Airlines. These days, in the midst of the Second Great Depression, even a blue-chip stock will barely cover a latte at Starbuck’s. But blue, which has so many poetic shades—robin’s egg, acquamarine, teal, cyan, navy, midnight, sapphire, turquoise, lapis lazuli—blue, which is both a synonym for the most common of mood disorders as well as “the most spiritual of colors” (according to Russian painter Vassily Kandinsky), yields nothing but delight. So herewith I parse and probe my passion, with every hope that you, dear reader, will be lifted out of whatever ill humor you might be suffering from and into what Emily Dickinson (no stranger to mood disorders herself) called “inns of molten blue.”