Goodbye Darkness

William Styron died this week. Incredible writer. Overcame the grip of depression.

From The New York Times:

All his novels, Mr. Styron once observed, focused on one recurrent theme: “the catastrophic propensity on the part of human beings to attempt to dominate one another.” He speculated in a 1982 interview that this theme found him, as a result of being a young soldier in World War II, contemplating “the forces in history that simply wipe you out”:

“You’re suddenly a cipher — you find yourself on some hideous atoll in the Pacific, and if you’re unlucky you get a bullet through your head.” He added that “within the microcosm of the Marine Corps itself, you’re just a mound of dust in terms of free will, and I think this fact of being helpless enlarges one’s sensitivity to the idea of evil.”