The Noonday Demon (6 page)

I love this century. I would love to have the capacity for time travel because I would love to visit biblical Egypt, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, to see the heyday of the Inca, to meet the inhabitants of Great Zimbabwe, to see what America was like when the indigenous peoples held the land. But there is no other time in which I would prefer to live. I love the comforts of modern life. I love the complexity of our philosophy. I love the sense of vast transformation that hangs on us at this new millennium, the feeling that we are at the brink of knowing more than people have ever known before. I like the relatively high level of social tolerance that exists in the countries where I live. I like being able to travel around the world over and over and over again. I like that people live longer than they have ever lived before, that time is a little more on our side than it was a thousand years ago.

We are, however, facing an unparalleled crisis in our physical environment. We are consuming the production of the earth at a frightening pace, sabotaging the land, sea, and sky. The rain forest is being destroyed; our oceans brim with industrial waste; the ozone layer is depleted. There are far more people in the world than there have ever been before, and next year there will be even more, and the year after that there will
be many more again. We are creating problems that will trouble the next generation, and the next, and the next after that. Man has been changing the earth ever since the first flint knife was shaped from a stone and the first seed was sowed by an Anatolian farmer, but the pace of alteration is now getting severely out of hand. I am not an environmental alarmist. I do not believe that we are at the brink of apocalypse right now. But I am convinced that we must take steps to alter our current course if we are not to pilot ourselves into oblivion.

It is an indication of the resilience of humankind that we unearth new solutions to those problems. The world goes on and so does the species. Skin cancer is far more prevalent than it used to be because the atmosphere provides us far less protection from the sun. Summers, I wear lotions and creams with high SPF levels, and they help to keep me safe. I have from time to time gone to a dermatologist, who has snipped off an outsize freckle and sent it off to a lab to be checked. Children who once ran along the beach naked are now slathered in protective ointments. Men who once worked shirtless at noon now wear shirts and try to find the shade. We have the ability to cope with this aspect of this crisis. We invent new ways, which are well short of living in the dark. Sunblock or no sunblock, however, we must try not to destroy what’s left. Right now, there’s still a lot of ozone out there and it’s still doing its job moderately well. It would be better for the environment if everyone stopped using cars, but that’s not going to happen unless there’s a tidal wave of utter crisis. Frankly, I think there will be men living on the moon before there will be a society free of automotive transport. Radical change is impossible and in many ways undesirable, but change is certainly required.

It appears that depression has been around as long as man has been capable of self-conscious thought. It may be that depression existed even before that time, that monkeys and rats and perhaps octopi were suffering the disease before those first humanoids found their way into their caves. Certainly the symptomatology of our time is more or less indistinguishable from what was described by Hippocrates some twenty-five hundred years ago. Neither depression nor skin cancer is a creation of the twenty-first century. Like skin cancer, depression is a bodily affliction that has escalated in recent times for fairly specific reasons. Let us not stand too long ignoring the clear message of burgeoning problems. Vulnerabilities that in a previous era would have remained undetectable now blossom into full-blown clinical illness. We must not only avail ourselves of the immediate solutions to our current problems, but also seek to contain those problems and to avoid their purloining all our minds. The climbing rates of depression are without question the consequence of modernity. The pace of life, the technological chaos of it, the alienation of
people from one another, the breakdown of traditional family structures, the loneliness that is endemic, the failure of systems of belief (religious, moral, political, social—anything that seemed once to give meaning and direction to life) have been catastrophic. Fortunately, we have developed systems for coping with the problem. We have medications that address the organic disturbances, and therapies that address the emotional upheavals of chronic disease. Depression is an increasing cost for our society, but it is not ruinous. We have the psychological equivalents of sunscreens and baseball hats and shade.

But do we have the equivalent of an environmental movement, a system to contain the damage we are doing to the social ozone layer? That there are treatments should not cause us to ignore the problem that is treated. We need to be terrified by the statistics. What is to be done? Sometimes it seems that the rate of illness and the number of cures are in a sort of competition to see which can outstrip the other. Few of us want to, or can, give up modernity of thought any more than we want to give up modernity of material existence. But we must start doing small things now to lower the level of socio-emotional pollution. We must look for faith (in anything: God or the self or other people or politics or beauty or just about anything else) and structure. We must help the disenfranchised whose suffering undermines so much of the world’s joy—for the sake both of those huddled masses and of the privileged people who lack profound motivation in their own lives. We must practice the business of love, and we must teach it too. We must ameliorate the circumstances that conduce to our terrifyingly high levels of stress. We must hold out against violence, and perhaps against its representations. This is not a sentimental proposal; it is as urgent as the cry to save the rain forest.

At some point, a point we have not quite reached but will, I think, reach soon, the level of damage will begin to be more terrible than the advances we buy with that damage. There will be no revolution, but there will be the advent, perhaps, of different kinds of schools, different models of family and community, different processes of information. If we are to continue on earth, we will have to do so. We will balance treating illness with changing the circumstances that cause it. We will look to prevention as much as to cure. In the maturity of the new millennium, we will, I hope, save this earth’s rain forests, the ozone layer, the rivers and streams, the oceans; and we will also save, I hope, the minds and hearts of the people who live here. Then we will curb our escalating fear of the demons of the noon—our anxiety and depression.

The people of Cambodia live in the compass of immemorial tragedy. During the 1970s, the revolutionary Pol Pot established a Maoist dictatorship
in Cambodia in the name of what he called the Khmer Rouge. Years of bloody civil war followed, during which more than 20 percent of the population was slaughtered. The educated elite was obliterated, and the peasantry was regularly moved from one location to another, some of them taken into prison cells where they were mocked and tortured; the entire country lived in perpetual fear. It is hard to rank wars—recent atrocities in Rwanda have been particularly ravaging—but certainly the Pol Pot period was as awful as any time anywhere in recent history. What happens to your emotions when you have seen a quarter of your compatriots murdered, when you have lived yourself in the hardship of a brutal regime, when you are fighting against the odds to rebuild a devastated nation? I hoped to see what happens to feeling among the citizens of a nation when they have all endured such traumatic stress, are desperately poor, have virtually no resources, and have little chance for education or employment. I might have chosen other locations to find suffering, but I did not want to go into a country at war, since the despair psychology of wartime is usually frenzied, while the despair that follows devastation is more numb and all-encompassing. Cambodia is not a country in which faction fought brutally against faction; it is a country in which everyone was at war with everyone else, in which all the mechanisms of society were completely annihilated, in which there was no love left, no idealism, nothing good for anyone.

The Cambodians are in general affable, and they are friendly as can be to foreigners who visit them. Most of them are soft-spoken, gentle, and attractive. It’s hard to believe that this lovely country is the one in which Pol Pot’s atrocities took place. Everyone I met had a different explanation for how the Khmer Rouge could have happened there, but none of these explanations made sense, just as none of the explanations for the Cultural Revolution or for Stalinism or for Nazism makes sense. These things happen to societies, and in retrospect it is possible to understand why a nation was especially vulnerable to them; but where in the human imagination such behaviors originate is unknowable. The social fabric is always very thin, but it is impossible to know how it gets vaporized entirely as it did in these societies. The American ambassador there told me that the greatest problem for the Khmer people is that traditional Cambodian society has no peaceful mechanism to resolve conflict. “If they have differences,” he said, “they have to deny them and suppress them totally, or they have to take out knives and fight.” A Cambodian member of the current government said that the people had been too subservient to an absolute monarch for too many years and didn’t think to fight against authority until it was too late. I heard at least a dozen other stories; I remain skeptical.

During interviews with people who had suffered atrocities at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, I found that most preferred to look forward. When I pressed them on personal history, however, they would slip into the mournful past tense. The stories I heard were inhuman and terrifying and repulsive. Every adult I met in Cambodia had suffered such external traumas as would have driven most of us to madness or suicide. What they had suffered within their own minds was at yet another level of horror. I went to Cambodia to be humbled by the pain of others, and I was humbled down to the ground.

Five days before I left the country, I met with Phaly Nuon, a sometime candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, who has set up an orphanage and a center for depressed women in Phnom Penh. She has achieved astonishing success in resuscitating women whose mental afflictions are such that other doctors have left them for dead. Indeed her success has been so enormous that her orphanage is almost entirely staffed by the women she has helped, who have formed a community of generosity around Phaly Nuon. If you save the women, it has been said, they will in turn save the children, and so by tracing a chain of influence one can save the country.

We met in a small room in an old office building near the center of Phnom Penh. She sat on a chair on one side, and I sat on a small sofa opposite. Phaly Nuon’s asymmetrical eyes seem to see through you at once and, nonetheless, to welcome you in. Like most Cambodians, she is relatively diminutive by Western standards. Her hair, streaked grey, was pulled back from her face and gave it a certain hardness of emphasis. She can be aggressive in making a point, but she is also shy, smiling and looking down whenever she is not speaking.

We started with her own story. In the early seventies, Phaly Nuon worked for the Cambodian Department of the Treasury and Chamber of Commerce as a typist and shorthand secretary. In 1975, when Phnom Penh fell to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, she was taken from her house with her husband and her children. Her husband was sent off to a location unknown to her, and she had no idea whether he was executed or remained alive. She was put to work in the countryside as a field laborer with her twelve-year-old daughter, her three-year-old son, and her newborn baby. The conditions were terrible and food was scarce, but she worked beside her fellows, “never telling them anything, and never smiling, as none of us ever smiled, because we knew that at any moment we could be put to death.” After a few months, she and her family were packed off to another location. During the transfer, a group of soldiers tied her to a tree and made her watch while her daughter was gang-raped and then murdered. A few days later it was Phaly Nuon’s turn. She was brought with some fellow laborers to a field outside of town. Then they tied her hands behind her back and roped her legs together. After forcing her to her knees, they tied her to a rod of bamboo, and they made her lean forward over a mucky field, so that her legs had to be tensed or she would lose her balance. The idea was that when she finally dropped of exhaustion, she would fall forward into the mud and, unable to move, would drown in it. Her three-year-old son bellowed and cried beside her. The infant was tied to her so that he would drown in the mud when she fell: Phaly Nuon would be the murderer of her own baby.

Phaly Nuon told a lie. She said that she had, before the war, worked for one of the high-level members of the Khmer Rouge, that she had been his lover, that he would be angry if she were killed. Few people escaped the killing fields, but a captain who perhaps believed Phaly Nuon’s story eventually said that he couldn’t bear the sound of her children screaming and that bullets were too expensive to waste on killing her quickly, and he untied Phaly Nuon and told her to run. Her baby in one arm and the three-year-old in the other, she bolted deep into the jungle of northeastern Cambodia. She stayed in the jungle for three years, four months, and eighteen days. She never slept twice in the same place. As she wandered, she picked leaves and dug for roots to feed herself and her family, but food was hard to find and other, stronger foragers had often stripped the land bare. Severely malnourished, she began to waste away. Her breast milk soon ran dry, and the baby she could not feed died in her arms. She and her remaining child just barely held on to life and managed to get through the period of war.

By the time Phaly Nuon told me this, we had both moved to the floor between our seats, and she was weeping and rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, while I sat with my knees under my chin and a hand on her shoulder in as much of an embrace as her trancelike state during her narrative would allow. She went on in a half-whisper. After the war was over, she found her husband. He had been severely beaten around the head and neck, resulting in significant mental deficit. She and her husband and her son were all placed in a border camp near Thailand, where thousands of people lived in temporary tented structures. They were physically and sexually abused by some of the workers at the camp, and helped by others. Phaly Nuon was one of the only educated people there, and, knowing languages, she could talk to the aid workers. She became an important part of the life of the camp, and she and her family were given a wooden hut that passed for comparative luxury. “I helped with certain aid tasks at that time,” she recalls. “All the time while I went around, I saw women who were in very bad shape, many of them seeming paralyzed, not moving, not talking, not feeding or caring for their own children. I saw that though they had survived the war, they were
now going to die from their depression, their utterly incapacitating post–traumatic stress.” Phaly Nuon made a special request to the aid workers and set up her hut in the camp as a sort of psychotherapy center.