David Foster Wallace on Suicide

[monk222]

Susanna gives us a wonderful quote from "Infinite Jest" relating the hell of suicidal depression:

The so-called "psychotically depressed" person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of "hopelessness" or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flame yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling "Don't" and "Hang On," can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

It's all the more poignant that David Foster Wallace just recently lost in his own struggle against the pull of the abyss.

One of these days, I'm going to have to satisfy my curiosity and at least give "Infinite Jest" the good old college try, even if I have to skim through significant parts of it.