“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to
kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘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
flames. And 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.”
David Foster Wallace
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