have you suffered the torment of insomnia, when you count the minutes for nights on end, when you feel alone in this world, when your drama seems to be the most important in history and history ceases to have meaning, ceases to exist?

are you familiar with the frightening sensation of melting, the feeling of dissolving into a flowing river, in which the self is annulled by organic liquidization? everything solid and substantial in you melts away in a wearisome fluidity, and the only thing left is your head. i'm speaking of a precise painful sensation, not a vague and undetermined one. as in a hallucinatory dream, you feel that only your head is left, without foundation and support, without a body. this feeling has nothing to do with that vague and voluptuous weariness by the seaside or in melancholy dreamy musings; it is a weariness which consumes and destroys. no effort, no hope, no illusion can satisfy you any longer. shocked witless by your own catastrophe, unable to think or to act, caught in cold and heavy darkness, solitary as in moments of profound regret, you have reached the negative limit of life, its absolute temperature, where the last illusions about life freeze.

from On the Heights of Despair by E. M. Cioran