The Fear of Falling: Why it Matters

I orig­i­nally wrote this back in Sep­tem­ber, after hear­ing the news of David Fos­ter Wallace’s sui­cide. Recent events have caused me to rethink why I was sit­ting on this post…

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’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less ter­ri­ble of two ter­rors. It’s not desir­ing the fall; it’s ter­ror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the side­walk, look­ing up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can under­stand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have per­son­ally been trapped and felt flames to really under­stand a ter­ror way beyond falling. David Fos­ter Wal­lace, Infi­nite Jest

The sad irony of this pas­sage is that the man who wrote it as an observer (“you or me”) became the per­son for whom the fear of falling couldn’t over­come the fear of the flames.

Appar­ently, David Fos­ter Wal­lace bat­tled crip­pling depres­sion for over 20 years. The anti­de­pres­sants stopped work­ing. I think this is the part that sticks with me. At least two of the most impor­tant peo­ple in my life are wrestling with depres­sion right now, and it scares me to think some­one can get so hope­less that this is the only way out they see.

It might not seem like much to those feel­ing the flames, and ulti­mately, it’s trite and cliche, but true. Some­thing like this really does make you think about the big stuff — what’s impor­tant — and hope­fully let the peo­ple you love know that they are just that.

Loved.

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