Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

by William Styron

One of the century’s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

There is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits superhuman endurance.