Anhedonia vs. "It" — the Great White Shark of pain; "a hell for one"

pivotal · UNDATED (narratorial exposition, keyed to her YDAU Withdrawal)

• When: UNDATED — the authoritative narratorial meditation on depression, focalized through Kate and her marijuana-Withdrawal (YDAU residency era)
• What: The novel's fullest theory of depression, hung on Kate. It distinguishes two kinds: low-grade anhedonia (a "spiritual torpor," "emotional novocaine," the world reduced to "a map of the world," an Inability To Identify) — which younger E.T.A.s wrongly take to be what killed J.O. Incandenza — from the far worse clinical/psychotic depression Kate knows "simply as It": "the Great White Shark of pain," a level of psychic pain "wholly incompatible with human life," "a nausea of the cells and soul," a mystical anti-unity with a world that means the self harm; loneliness so total ("a hell for one") that empathy is impossible; and a "psychotic" quality that means her appropriate screams read as unmotivated to outsiders. It supplies her burning-building parable of suicide (the person who leaps does so not out of desire for the fall but terror of the flames), and it exposes the "Suicide Contract" the halfway house makes her sign as absurd against Its overriding terror.