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The so-called __sychotically depressed_ person who tries to kill herself doesn__ do so out of quote __opelessness_ or any abstract conviction that life__ 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__ flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It__ not desiring the fall; it__ terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling __on__!_ and __ang 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
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The so-called __sychotically depressed_ person who tries to kill herself doesn__ do so out of quote __opelessness_ or any abstract conviction that life__ 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__ flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It__ not desiring the fall; it__ terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling __on__!_ and __ang 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.

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AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that's ultimately definable only ostensively-i.e., we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn't particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims' various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, in which the deacon of a South Shore church reportedly gave chase to a vehicle that bad cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a highpowered crossbow, was borderline Lynchian. A Rotary luncheon where everybody's got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat and is eating bland Rotarian chicken and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not.

DW
David Foster Wallace

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments