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Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's just me -- and I never met the man -- but I've never had someone convince me they understood what it's like to be terminally depressed as completely as the writing of DFW. It boggles my mind that someone could miss or misbelieve that.

The way that "This is Water" speech/pamphlet is brought up in particular horrifies me. Hindsight granted, it's always read to me as someone who, stuck in a deep, dark hole for so long, has given up on finding a way out. Blaming himself for being there in the first place. Standing so close to an answer, but unable to see it. And we know how the story ends.

It's a feeling I know well, and I'm routinely shocked how people without (I assume) first-hand experience with depression can completely ignore the darkness there, and see something banal or even encouraging.

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I don't love the Kenyan College address as much as a lot of people do, but the idea that it's treacle, or a depressive's accounting of the tribulations of going to a grocery store (and one wonders: how can it be both?) seems like horseshit. To me, it seems like a pretty straightforward recapitulation of the ideas behind cognitive behavioral therapy, which Wallace probably had more than a passing familiarity with.

To answer your rhetorical: It can be both because depression makes boring things terrifying in a way non-depressed people find boring again. shrug

Anyway, I don't want to go too deeply into this, so I'll just say you're actually not far off from what I'm saying. What saddens me about "This is Water" is the fact that it's so close to something that might have been really helpful to him. He's talking about these daily experiences, and noticing how he's feeling. He feels bad. That's good; feeling bad helps.

And what he thinks next is... You have a choice of how to feel. Think about everyone who feels even worse. You can decide what you care about. Don't think of an elephant.

That isn't CBT, nor anything therapeutic-- that's depression, at its most pernicious and deadly.

I love the Kenyon address more than any other piece of writing I can think of. I don't read any particular complexity or symbolic meaning into it other than the seemingly revolutionary idea that all the people in the world with you are pursuing their own goals, and are harried by their own demons, and are basically doing the best they can in the circumstances they're in, so maybe you should be a little bit charitable to them, in your own mind, and by extension charitable to yourself.

The attitude taken toward that speech, and by extension toward that sentiment, by the smug asshole in TOA makes me almost fighting mad.

> I've never had someone convince me they understood what it's like to be terminally depressed as completely as the writing of DFW.

Just wanted to repeat that, because it's how I feel as well. It's why I consider his writing to be among the best I've ever read; not because of the hyper-literacy (although that's pretty fun too), but because of the level of insight effectively shared.

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