Reader's Digest: January 27, 2024

I am late to this electric essay by Mala Chatterjee in Aeon. It’s about severe depression and the timeline is—deliberately?—confused. Two bits stood out to me.

One is about reading David Foster Wallace in hospital, after a suicide attempt, in the company of a close friend:

It all felt a bit like Bible study or something, in the fluorescent sterility and chaos of that strange space, and I remember my friend making some fittingly dark joke about how this was probably how DFW would’ve most wanted the book to be read anyway: like the word of God, among rock bottoms, being involuntarily held.

I’m fascinated by the power of comedy to console—or more than console—in the face of trauma. Mala Chatterjee is, too:

Wallace’s raw hilarity … fills so much of Infinite Jest (1996)—a grotesque humour, one that could punctuate my otherwise continuously unbearable tenure on that sofa with stitches of transcendent laughter, and which not only kept me alive but sometimes feeling alive, wanting to be, hoping …