He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.
Jonathan FranzenTags: love writing self-esteem addiction suicide self-confidence desperation mental-illness david-foster-wallace
We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it, could see that David was wrong not to believe in his lovability and could imagine the pain of not believing in it. How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult--what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be--if you are not! And yet ... the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind. Even though David laughed at my much milder addictions and liked to tell me that I couldn't even conceive of how moderate I was, I can still extrapolate from these addictions, and from the secretiveness and solipsism and radical isolation and raw animal craving that accompany them, to the extremity of his. I can imagine the sick mental pathways by which suicide comes to seem like the one consciousness-quenching substance that nobody can take away from you.
Jonathan FranzenTags: love addiction suicide mental-illness david-foster-wallace
She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.
Jonathan FranzenWhat lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so happy to live in
Jonathan FranzenBelieve me,' [...] 'I would know about it. That's the difference between me and your girlfriend. I am the jealous type. I am the Spanish Inquisition when it comes to being fucked around on. No quarter will be given.
Jonathan FranzenTags: jealousy girlfriend cheating
The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
Jonathan FranzenTags: solitude loneliness suicide problems depression satisfaction emptiness lonely empty boredom anxiety dissatisfaction void distractions solitary facebook david-foster-wallace stimulation jonathan-franzen robinson-crusoe endlessness virtual facebook-quotes first-world-problems cyber cyberworld facebook-addiction filler
And this of course, was the simplest definition of depression that he knew of: strongly disliking yourself.
Jonathan FranzenTaking a cab to the city center, she was pierced unexpectedly by regret for not doing exactly that: not walking the streets as an independent adult woman, not cultivating an independent life, not being a sensible and curious tourist instead of a love-chasing madwoman.
Jonathan FranzenEdith Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty.
Jonathan FranzenTags: edith-wharton
Но дори и най-баналните домакински задължения като работа в градината, чистене или пазаруване й се струваха по-приятни и по-спешни от въргалянето в кревата и след като в главата ти се загнезди мисълта, че трябва набързо да се отпуснеш и още по-бързо да достигнеш до екстаз, така че да можеш да излезеш да пресадиш циганчетата, които увяхват в малките си пластмасови саксийки, няма връщане назад.
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