"You Look at the Black Hole and It's Wearing Your Face."
Novelist David Foster Wallace, who killed himself recently at age 46, suffered most of his life, it turns out, from the fearsome mental illness of clinical depression, or from the side effects of a drug that kept him out of the demons' clutches at a cost. Trying to get off that drug, once he was happily married, doomed him. His suicide was not a surprise to those closest to him. Way back in the 1980s he had written:
You are the sickness yourself.... You realize all
this...when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face.
That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather
when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this
business about people committing suicide when they're "severely
depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them
from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people
have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it
really counts.... When they "commit suicide," they're just being
orderly.
What a pity, in the most bottomless sense of the word.
Oh my. How prescient... That quote is as foretelling as it is potent.
Posted by: jason | November 03, 2008 at 10:14 AM
More David Foster Wallace (via Charlie):
BTW, The Bradley Effect theory may or may not be valid. It is only a theory, an unproven theory that attempts to explain discrepancies between pollsters' predictions and actual election results. Allow me, please, to suggest a theory of my own:
Hundreds of thousands of moderate independent voters who have indicated to prying pollsters that they will likely vote for Barack Obama will go to polls tomorrow and vote for John McCain because they know that he is qualified to lead the country for the next four years and that they will not get another chance to do so.
Posted by: Meade | November 03, 2008 at 10:48 AM
A heartbreaking (and very well-written) story.
Posted by: david | November 03, 2008 at 12:13 PM