fun stuff: infinite blue

"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 have to have personally been trapped and

felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

                                                                                     - david foster wallace

my scrap blanket is getting bluer and bigger...

and my reading this week

is david foster wallace's infinte jest.

i went looking for this behemoth of a book after watching the movie

'end of the tour' which was a biography of this writing genius 

who ended up killing himself at the age of 46.

it's suppose to be one of those books that will change your life ?!?

what are you knitting? reading?

care to share?

erica

xoxo

joining frontier dreams and small things