Bufflehead Cabin

Yes it’s nearly one thousand pages followed by a hundred pages of footnotes. Yes, it’s dense as a scone. So why bother reading it? Here’s an example, part of a dialogue between a female patient & her doctor, made more poignant by Wallace’s recent suicide after years of struggle with depression:

“When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.” … “Well this” — she gestured at herself — “isn’t a state. This is a feeling. I feel it all over. in my arms and legs. … All over. My head, throat, butt. In my stomach. It’s all over everywhere. I don’t know what to call it. It’s like I can’t get enough outside it to call it anything. It’s like horror more than sadness. It’s more like horror. It’s like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you imagine — no, worse than you can imagine because there’s the feeling that there’s something you have to do right away to stop it but you don’t know what it is you have to do, and then it’s happening, too, the whole horrible time, it’s about to happen and also it’s happening, all at the same time. … Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Lurid is the word. … That’s the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh-sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower. It’s like what’s the point of washing if everything smells like I need another shower.”