Throughout the book, Kay Redfield Jamison makes reference to the sky, the ether, heavenly bodies, and far-off planets as she describes the feelings that the fits of mania she experienced in her late teens and early twenties allowed her to experience. When manic, Kay was flying high—so high, she says, that she believed she might one day touch the rings of Saturn. While Jamison perhaps doesn’t mean such statements literally, she invokes the planets and the heavens to symbolize the freedom mania gave her—and the delusions with which it burdened her. The planets and the heavens, whenever discussed throughout An Unquiet Mind, come to symbolize the duality of manic-depressive illness: its soaring highs, its devastating lows, and its ability to profoundly disconnect its sufferers from reality.
The Planets and the Heavens Quotes in An Unquiet Mind
Long since that extended voyage of my mind and soul, Saturn and its icy rings took on an elegiac beauty and I don’t see Saturn's image now without feeling an acute sadness at is being so far away from me, so unobtainable in so many ways. The intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness of my mind’s flight made it very difficult for me to believe, once I was better, that the illness was one I should willingly give up. […] It was difficult to give up the high flights of mind and mood, even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.
There a time when I honestly believed that there was only a certain amount of pain one had to go through in life. Because manic-depressive illness had brought such misery and uncertainty in its wake, I presumed life should therefore be kinder to me in other, more balancing ways. But then I also had believed that I could fly through starfields and slide along the rings of Saturn.
The Planets and the Heavens Symbol Timeline in An Unquiet Mind
