Anhedonia and It (p. 698)
The man’s fondest dream was anhedonia, complete psychic numbing. I.e. death in life. The prospect of radical psychosurgery was the dangled carrot that Kate guessed still gave the man’s life enough meaning for him to hang onto the windowsill by his fingernails, which were probably black and gnarled from the flames.
Context
The essay's coda joins its two species in one ruined life: Ernest Feaster of Wellesley Hills, seventeen straight treatment-proof years of It, awaiting the psychosurgery that would trade It for total numbness — the first kind of depression as the second kind's paradise. "Death in life" is the same phrase the wraith later uses for the figurants' solipsism (p. 839).