David Foster Wallace wrote, in the pages of Infinite Jest, about it being

a nausea of the cells and soul

Marvelously apt, but also reminds one of the great ancestors in the literature of depression, Jean-Paul Sartre. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but more than misanthropy, aren’t plays like Huis Clos (No Exit) really about the alienating features of depression? But, really, what that phrase drove me to was Sartre’s Nausea.

We are trained to look at it from a rarefied angle: Kierkegaardian anguish of the soul (though not ‘soul,’ this is Sartre, but anguish of the ‘being’ isn’t so Kierkegaardian as of the soul) and anger at the shallowness of other people and their inability to comprehend the absence of outside meaning in the world.

But the red-haried protagonist and his writer’s block (he can’t finish a book about Gustave Flaubert) and his inability to connect with a past lover he desperately wants to re-connect to… isn’t he depressed? And lashing out at his former flame, sabotaging their connection, that pained combination of pushing away and begging for someone not to be pushed away by one…

Sartre would probably hate this comparison.