Anhedonia and It (p. 695)
It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self.
Context
The essay's second species of depression — Kate Gompert's predator-grade It — completes the cartographic taxonomy the map-of-the-world sentence began. Anhedonia flattens the world into a map; It does the opposite and worse, restoring the territory in full ("fully rich and animate and un-map-like") but with every constituent turned against the self. Between the two poles, the book makes sanity a matter of holding map and territory in livable relation — exactly what Eschaton's players couldn't do.