Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast.
I’m not talking about onset or duration. I mean the quality of the insanity, the day-to-day business of being nuts.
There are a lot of names: depression, catatonia, mania, anxiety, agitation. They don’t tell you much.
The predominant quality of the slow form is viscosity.
Experience is thick. Perceptions are thickened and dulled. Time is slow, dripping slowly through the clogged filter of thickened perception. The body temperature is low. The pulse is sluggish. The immune system is half-asleep. The organism is torpid and brackish. Even the reflexes are diminished, as if the lower leg couldn’t be bothered to jerk itself out of its stupor when the knee is tapped.
Viscosity occurs on a cellular level. And so does velocity.
— Susana Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted.
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