Taylor had discovered “positive illusion”—the opposite of depressive realism, a kind of healthy illusion found not just in a trivial button-pushing test, but in life-threatening illness.

In conventional, modern life, we listen to the voice of the self and take it seriously.

What is so potentially dangerous about the power this voice can have over us is that we lose contact with the fact that we are even listening to a voice.

At length I explained to him that life had brought me to a dead end from which there was no exit, and that the only way out for me was suicide. When you say something like that, you expect to be contradicted. But instead of contradicting me, Roustang had said softly: ‘You’re right. Suicide doesn’t get very good press these days, but sometimes it’s