The billowing-dread — the horror his intellect was built to keep at bay

pivotal · UNDATED (childhood onset; recurs to sophomore year at Brown); recalled 13 Nov YDAU

• When: first rises age ~9-10 (a summer afternoon), recurs for a year, then last rises his sophomore year at Brown University; recalled to Kate Gompert 13 Nov YDAU
• What: As a boy, practicing violin by a window fan whose vibration combined with certain notes into a resonance, Day felt "a large dark billowing shape" — shapeless, "a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality" — rise out of a corner of his mind: "total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space." He probed it like a scab, re-summoned it, "awakened" it; it came and went for a year, then receded, then rose worst of all his sophomore year at Brown, when he nearly threw himself from a dormitory window and a near-stranger sat up with him all night. He says he understood the word "hell" as of that day — and understood, intuitively, "why people killed themselves." It has not returned in over twenty years, but he has not forgotten. This is the closest the book comes to the ground of Day's whole apparatus of cleverness and abstraction: the dread his intellectualizing is a defense against (the drinking-origin reading is thematic/inferred — Day narrates the terror as his understanding of hell and suicide, not explicitly as why he drank; as printed).