I've been on antidepressants for, what. about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I'm pretty qualified to tell what they're like. They're fine, really, but they're fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn't be good old Earth, obviously. I haven't been on Earth now for almost a year. because I wasn't doing very well on Earth. I've been doing somewhat better here where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon, which I suppose is good news for everyone involved.

Antidepressants were prescribed for me by a very nice doctor named Dr. Kablumbus at a hospital to which I was sent ever so briefly following a really highly ridiculous incident involving electrical appliances in the bathtub about which I really don't wish to say a whole lot. [...]

[...] And yet whenever I'd look in the mirror. there it would be, and I could always feel the heat of the blood on my cheek, and when I'd feel with my hand my fingers would sink in there really deep into what felt like hot gelatin with bones and ropes and stuff in it. And it seemed like everyone was always looking at it. They'd seem to stare at me really funny, and I'd think "Oh God. I'm really making them sick, they see it. I've got to hide, get me out of here." But they were probably only staring because I looked all scared and in pain and kept my hand to my face and was staggering like I was drunk all over the place all the time. But at the time, it seemed so real. Weird. weird. weird. [...]

[...] A very glib guy on the television said some people liken it to being underwater, under a body of water that has no surface, at least for you, so that no matter what direction you go, there will only be more water, no fresh air and freedom of movement, just restriction and suffocation, and no light. (I don't know how apt It is to say it's like being underwater, but maybe imagine the moment in which you realize, at which It hits you that there is no surface for you, that you're just going to drown in there no matter which way you swim; imagine how you'd feel at that exact moment, like Descartes at the start of his second thing, then imagine that feeling in all its really delightful choking intensity spread out over hours, days, months ... that would maybe be more apt.) [...]

[...] This is the way the Bad Thing works: it's especially good at attacking your defense mechanisms. The way to fight against or get away from the Bad Thing is clearly just to think differently, to reason and argue with yourself, just to change the way you're perceiving and sensing and processing stuff. But you need your mind to do this, your brain cells with their atoms and your mental powers and all that, your self, and that's exactly what the Bad Thing has made too sick to work right. That's exactly what it has made sick. It's made you sick in just such a way that you can't get better. And you start thinking about this pretty vicious situation, and you say to yourself, "Boy oh boy, how the heck is the Bad Thing able to do this?" You think about it--really hard, since it's in your best interests to do so--and then all of a sudden it sort of dawns on you ... that the Bad Thing is able to do this to you because you're the Bad Thing yourself! The Bad Thing is you. Nothing else: no bacteriological infection or having gotten conked on the head with a board or a mallet when you were a little kid, or any other excuse; you are the sickness yourself. It is what "defines" you, especially after a little while has gone by. You realize all this, here. And that, I guess, is when if you're all glib you realize that there is no surface to the water, or when you bonk your nose on the jar's glass and realize you're trapped. or when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts. [...]

[...] The new noise on my planet is kind of a high-tension electric trill. That's why for almost a year now I've somehow always gotten the name of my antidepressant wrong when I'm not looking right at the bottle: I've called it 'Trillaphon" instead of "Tofranil," because "Trillaphon" is more trilly and electrical, and it just sounds more like what it's like to be there. [...]

The big question is whether the Bad Thing is on the planet Trillaphon. I don't know if it is or not. Maybe it has a harder time in a thinner and less nutritious atmosphere. I certainly do, in some respects. Sometimes, when I don't think about it, I think I have just totally escaped the Bad Thing, and that I am going to be able to lead a Normal and Productive Life as a lawyer or something here on the planet Trillaphon, once I get so I can read again.

Being far away sort of helps with respect to the Bad Thing.

Except that is just highly silly when you think about what I said before concerning the fact that the Bad Thing is really

[...] Reading "The Planet Trillaphon" I felt, for the first time, like I understood the vicious logic of real depression: how it feeds on and amplifies itself, establishes a closed loop between what D. T. Max terms "anxiety" and "the fear of anxiety." There's a bruised, frightened human heart at the center of "Trillaphon". A troubled little soldier. It creates a powerful irony--that this story, given over to a narrator who laments his inability to make others understand what he's going through, so effectively communicates his pain to us.

This essay on the loss of grace in tennis speaks then to the passing of a writer's first ecstatic access to creation. Wallace mourns the loss and maps a paradox that would become the seed idea of later work. The paradox is that although we need to live in peaks, these hypostatic highs of sex, success, religion, love, creation, conception, childbirth, or yes sports, we can only fully appreciate the peaks when they are passed and passing. Why? Because ecstasy's power lies in its wordlessness, its ability to make of us a happy holy blank. Because appreciation is a branch of thought, it is only in falling, in coming down from ecstasy, that we can know that we have briefly touched the ultimate. It is only in the falling too that we try to find words for the sublime [...]

The third is wordplay. Wallace doesn't bend grammar, but he bends English. He loves Germanic compounds like "shingle-sized" (describing pizza slices), "Rice-Krispie-squarish" (describing Krakkles), and "pubic-hair-shaped" (describing Curly Fries). If no existing adjective can do exactly what he wants, he invents one--for instance, "Jetsonian" (describing DIPPIN DOTS). The students, ecumenical scholars of pop culture, all get the reference.

[...]

The fifth is multisensory description. We all have noses, ears, tongues, and skin, but most people write as if they had only eyes. Not Wallace. That's how he makes us feel we're at the fair, not just reading about it. I ask for examples of each sense. Everyone speaks at once. Sound-carpet of deep fryers! Air spicy with antiperspirant and Coppertone! Yummy Elephant Ears! The weird, abstract texture of DIPPIN DOTS! I ask how they'd characterize "the green reek of fried tomatoes" and "bright-yellow popcorn that stinks of salt". It's Yale. At least four students cry out, Synesthesia!