On Thinking and an (Over)Active Mind

I have an overactive mind, always thinking.

If I’m working on a paper, it is there in my head at night, particularly in the early morning. Sometimes sentences come even while I’m sleeping!

I’ve had this gift (though it comes with an exhausting price), ever since I was a child, growing up in what I now call a “house of doom,” with a father who believed he was the last prophet, the prophet of the end-times. How could I possibly be calm? At least from the time I was eight, I found myself observing and analyzing (and, yes, sometimes writing).

One of my brothers could escape into fantasy and art, or make his mind go blank. But I was hypervigilant, always watching out, because I was never sure what would happen next. An unquiet mind, like the title of Kay Jamison’s wonderful book, only I am not bi-polar.

No wonder one of my favorite literary writers is the seventeenth-century “metaphysical” poet John Donne, always thinking in new ways, figuring things out with metaphors that startle the brain, whether he’s talking about erotic love or about God. Later in his life he wrote “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” when he was deathly ill and almost died. Twenty-three meditations chart the course of his illness as well as his physical, emotional, and spiritual experiences (Aren’t they all intertwined?) He wanted to find meaning in his experience.

Published in 1624, after he recovered, his Devotions have continued to touch readers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The phrase “for whom the bell tolls,” from Meditation 17, (referring to the funeral bell rung at a church when a member died) served as the title for Hemmingway’s novel of the same name. Donne’s Devotions found an eager audience during the AIDs crisis, for he spoke to the specific experiences and anguish of people affected by the disease—the wasting sickness, the marks, the isolation and fear of contagion. Then in 2020 came Covid-19, yet another plague. Andrew Como, as governor of New York, in his briefings, quoted “No man is an island” when stating the general public, nurses and hospitals, all needed to work together. As we were coming out of isolation, I included some of Donne’s meditations in my “Seventeenth-century Prose and Poetry” course, which I had subtitled: The Plague Years. My students fell in love with Donne. What he wrote almost exactly 400 years earlier resonated with them, powerfully during a time when Bessel Van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score” had been on the New York Times Bestseller List for hundreds of weeks.

Because, of course, we are anxious people, living in dark times, fighting fear in a world that seems broken in so many ways. Sometimes we are told not to “overthink” things. Just do it.

But there is a passage in Donne’s Devotions that particularly resonates for me, and that I read with my students. It comes in Meditation 12, where the physicians “apply pigeons, to draw the vapours from the head.” This bizarre medical treatment prompts Donne to think about why and how he has “vapours” in his head. Knowing these vapors can kill a person leads him to conclude there is something self-destructive in each of us, that our mind, the very act of thinking, physiologically can destroy us. (He is so far ahead of his time, but he also comes close to blaming God for making us this way.) So here is the wonderful passage in which Donne thinks about thinking. I hope you will like it as much as I do — paradoxically, its brilliance and wit make me happy.

“wee are not onely passive, but active too, to our owne destruction; But what have I done, either to breed or to breath these vapors ? They tell me it is my Melancholy; Did I infuse, did I drinke in Melancholly into my selfe ? It is my thoughtfulnesse; was I not made to thinke ? It is my study; doth not my Calling call for that?”