/lit/ - Literature

>>19557675
Because he couldn’t think, he couldn’t write, and had no discernible talent

>HELP ME! I'M A SELF OBSESSED AMERICAN WHO SMOKES TOO MUCH WEED AND ONLY CARES ABOUT MYSELF! BUT I'M UNHAPPY! HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN TO ME?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh7QWBb2U2A

>>19557675
Psychosis induced suicide
Happens all the time

>>19557675
he changed his antidepressants and the new ones did not work as well

>>19557675
I like the one Anons theory that it was a meta component of The Pale King. I think he wrote a dissertation on it. Surely someone else remembers too. Something about how all the characters are striving for self-knowledge through monumentally tedious labor in their own way, like the guy who is trying to become flexible enough to kiss every inch of his body but it will take years of training. DFW is a character in the book, but his suicide is a statement on the fact that attain self knowledge is impossible, ultimately. idk i haven't actually read the book but I want to.

>>19557675
"When a solipsist dies… everything goes with him."

>>19557694
truly an every-man

Couldnt get hard anymore

He knew he hadn't any talent.

>>19557700
The more I come to understand about the pale king the more I realize that people running on about it being “unfinished” are coping with the fact it’s almost directly supposed to be deeply unsatisfying.

>>19557765
Deeply unsatisfying describes just about everything DFW wrote.

>>19557700
So he killed himself to show off? Cringe.

>>19557780
No. It was a part of the art.

>>19557804
That's what he said. It's also a ridiculous and stupid theory.

>>19557808
Its trancendent and bold and impactful.

>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

>>19557828
Dave, take your lithium.

>>19557828
>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. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, 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.