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Kay’s Horse
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
The An Unquiet Mind quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Planets and the Heavens. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 4
Quotes
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.
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Chapter 7
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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.
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The Planets and the Heavens Symbol Timeline in An Unquiet Mind
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Planets and the Heavens appears in An Unquiet Mind. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: Into the Sun
...loved staring up into the sky and imagining the “wild blue yonder” and the blazing sun above. As Kay looked up at the aircraft on that day, however, her wonder turned...
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...a sense of invincibility and confidence—and the feeling that there was a “marvelous kind of cosmic relatedness” to everything in her life. After weeks of mania, she came to a “grinding...
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Chapter 2: An Education for Life
...with friends. The racing thoughts characteristic of mania remained, but instead of being “exuberant and cosmic,” the thoughts were horrific, graphic, and violent. Kay felt unable to ask for help, and...
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Chapter 3: Flights of the Mind
...attempts to describe the “high” of mania—during such states, she says, feelings are like “ shooting stars ” that grow brighter and brighter. One feels captivating, sensual, intense, capable, and euphoric—at least...
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Chapter 4: Missing Saturn
...of her descent into madness. A meteorologist’s daughter, she had always been fascinated by the heavens—her early days of madness provided the “illusion of high summer days […] lurching through cloud...
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...she’d been the best version of herself when mildly manic. She could not stop missing Saturn.
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Chapter 7: An Officer and a Gentleman
...that this belief was foolish—just months earlier, she’d imagined she could reach the rings of Saturn.
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Chapter 13: A Life in Moods
...her past. She misses the girl she once was—the girl who dreamed of dancing on Saturn’s rings—yet she never feels tempted to re-create such intensity in her present by going off...
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