depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship {...} feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibrating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news {...} Grim situations were Katz's niche the way murky water was a carp's {...} he might well have started making music again, had it not been for the accident of success. He flopped around on the ground, heavily carplike, his psychic gills straining futilely to extract dark sustenance from an atmosphere of approval and plenitude.
( Jonathan Franzen )
[ Freedom ]
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