This quote from the writing of David Foster Wallace perfectly explains my experience as an anhedonic. Wallace’s words resonate with me.
The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts.
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
Wallace, in his work Infinite Jest, uses footnotes, hundreds of footnotes and endnotes, some with footnotes within footnotes.
I like footnotes. I don’t know why, but I do. My memoir has dozens of footnotes, almost four dozen footnotes to be somewhat exact, but no footnotes within footnotes, although I tried. However, I did try with not all that effort.
Why copy the genius of Wallace?
When I discovered Wallace and his novel Infinite Jest, I felt a comradery with him, some kind of bonding.
Sadly, Wallace is no longer with us, and I can’t communicate with him on this world.
David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46 – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
My own understanding of the anhedonic state with the help of David Foster Wallace’s words
For myself, I understand the concept of anhedonia, as described by Wallace, the understanding of feeling in terms. Terms that I can mention and describe, although never feeling nor experiencing the emotion behind those terms in the first place.
I use this technique of concept description in my memoir. It was honed from my lifetime of not experiencing happiness.
Although I did not in actuality experience happiness, I spoke of it to others as if I did in fact experience it. I did this so that I would look and seem normal to them and the world.
Reading the words of poets and authors gave me the tools and words I needed to describe this foreign concept–happiness.
More on the anhedonic by David Foster Wallace
“Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy—happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love—are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.”
David Foster Wallace at a Manhattan bookstore in 2006.
Credit…Suzy Allman for The New York Times
— Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace | Postmodern Novelist, Essayist & Short Story Writer | Britannica
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace | Goodreads
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