To sink down was to give up on life and embrace hopelessness, like the words of an old bluesman: “Been down so long, down don’t bother me.” It was to go way down into a pit of despair, of nothingness, what Søren Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death,” a “sickness in the self”—the loss of hope that life could have meaning in a world full of trouble. The story of Job is the classic expression of utter despair in the face of life’s great contradictions:
