Durkheim introduced the idea of anomie in his first book, The Division of Labour in Society, but developed it much further in his second monograph Suicide: A Study in Sociology, in which he aimed to show that suicide, which at the time was widely thought to be a reflection of profound individual failings, often had social causes and so presumably could also have social solutions. He used the term to describe the feelings of intense dislocation, anxiety, and even anger that drove people to behave antisocially and, when desperate, perhaps take their own lives.

Since then, the kind of stability that Durkheim imagined would eventually settle in following industrialization has come to resemble just another infinite aspiration that slips frustratingly further away whenever it seems to be nearly in reach. Instead, as energy-capture rates have surged, new technologies have come online and our cities have continued to swell, constant and unpredictable change has become the new normal everywhere, and anomie looks increasingly like the permanent condition of the modern age.

It is a curious paradox that schizophrenia might be imagined as a condition of being both less or too much of whomever we might be. An intricate balance is lost.

It was not the voices in themselves that prompted such anguish with disastrous consequences, but the disruption of something beyond, and something that might be considered innate and particularly human: a sense of self, of the privacy of the self, and a precarious notion of free will.

Unlike the woman in Zweig’s novella, Pancake did not let the melodrama in him transgress. He gave more than he had, more than he ought to, but he did not trap anyone. People who have not experienced a suicidal urge miss a crucial point. It is not that one wants to end one’s life, but that the only way to end the pain—that eternal fight against one’s melodrama so that it does not transgress—is to wipe out the body. I distrust judgments—Mann’s or anyone’s—on suicide. They are, in the end, judgments on feelings.