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“It’s a fucking good night,” the man said to me, standing close to my face.

“Yes, it is,” I said, “it’s a very good night.” I looked at the Northern sky. “You won’t get rained on tonight.”

The man looked at me and smiled. “Thank you,” he said and stumbled away.

Boundaries have always fascinated me, and now they seemed everywhere. We use boundaries to give our world definition—boundaries of space, of time, of dimension, of the inanimate and animate, of the living and the dead. Boundaries also influence the way we construct our identity; with them we mark private and public space. They allow the entire concept of possession to exist: our nation, our home, our family, our traditions, our ethnicity.

And what constitutes compassion? How does it relate to boundaries? Does compassion, as distinct from pity, mean crossing skin-defined borders to a space outside of one’s body? Is compassion that ability to move out of the narrow perspective with which we generally contain our worlds and reverse it, actually place ourselves outside of our selves? How much is this possible? Perhaps the ultimate personal boundary is not life and death, but self and non-self.

A few days after the bar incident, I encountered what I think I recognized as true compassion in the sense I was exploring. I went for a walk along a residential street near Seattle’s downtown. Beside the sidewalk, I saw two huge bins of vegetables, one of red peppers. Crowds of people milled around the bins. I strolled over.

“You have to go inside first,” a man said.

“Oh.” I headed to the warehouse beside us.

Inside the warehouse, I stood in line for a minute or so. “Here,” a man said when I reached the counter. He pushed a sheet of paper toward me. “Just sign here.”

“What’s this for?” I asked. Then, I suddenly realized where I was. “Is this a food bank? I thought this was a market or something. I can pay for the food.”

“It’s OK,” the man said. “You only have to sign this sheet.”

“No, no,” I said, my cheeks reddening. “Really, I didn’t understand.” Behind me I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see two men. They both gave me gentle smiles.

“It’s all right,” one said. “We all have to do it sometime.”

I took long walks in the rain, watching the autumn colors change and fade. Everything around me felt too raw, unformed, and disconnected. I missed emotion, missed people touching me. I kept talking to strangers on the street. Few of them responded.

I realized I was depressed.

My years of living in London before I went to Brazil had influenced my attitudes about depression. In the United States, one is not supposed to get depressed. If depression approaches, one should immediately do something to get rid of it. Take drugs perhaps, go into trance. Our separate and individual responsibilities are to achieve and maintain constant states of happiness. Depression is antisocial and perhaps even deviant. The national emotional standard is set by drawings of smiling faces and a ritualized directive to “have a nice day.”

In London, however, my friends regarded depression as a sign of emotional depth. According to them, given the current state of the world, a person who is continually happy must be ignorant, superficial, and entirely lacking in a social conscience. Even more damning, an incessantly happy person is boring.

My friend Andrew in London seldom left his house; he had a paranoid fear of the outer world. “My depression is like a comfortable cloak,” he told me once. “Without depression, what would happen to art? Great world writers such as Lessing, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Harding, Atwood and Cheever—can you imagine them happy all the time? The image of a happy Kafka sends shivers down my spine. What about our world thinkers, painters, musicians?”

“I don’t like happiness,” another English friend, Alex, said to me once when we had drunk a little too much wine. Alex was an aristocrat, good looking, had received his Ph.D. by the