"I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously.
For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death
combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that
presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread
or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to
die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m
small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die.
It’s wanting to jump overboard."
(David Foster Wallace, all'anagrafe David Wallace, scrittore e saaggista; Ithaca, 21 febbraio 1962 – Claremont, 12 settembre 2008)