r/books • u/[deleted] • Aug 21 '16
One of the most powerful descriptions of suicide I've ever read. David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
"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."
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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '16
One of my best friends, my number one, committed suicide a few months a go. He'd talked about it for a long time – years. He always wanted to go the way he did. It was a surprise but not a shock when we found out. I knew the idea of suicide was on his shoulder, always, He chased the vortex, sought out the downwards spiral with benzos (and therefor altered his ability to chemically create dopamine). He was one of the silliest, most wonderful people I will ever meet. I miss him terribly and sudden details of him spring into my mind, the weird vein on his head, the way he'd fold in his mouth. But he was also terribly depressed and solitary – he couldn't ask for help, didn't know how, had been brought up in a cult. No one could have changed what happened to him, as sure as the sun comes up in the morning. I admire him for doing it; for living his life as richly and with love and laughter as he did. But fuck me, I miss him.