"Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy...happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love...are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas...It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels...Its emotional character is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency--sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying--are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. It is also lonely on a level than cannot be conveyed...
...He went to bed every night at home holding her, weeping for it to be over, while she prayed..."
--David Foster Wallace, from Infinite Jest
