A couple of weeks back, I had a really bad day and was feeling quite down. However, I was cheered up by this somewhere tounge-in-cheek depressing section of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that Wendell Berry quoted in one of his essays:
Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn’t make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me.
It just made me laugh to think that there wasn’t anything particularly depressing about the circumstances. It was all in my head, just like it was in Huck’s. Who knows what that owl and dog were really talking about!