Lovely observations culminating in DEEPLY flawed penultimate graf. I spent three years living with a roommate who was on a perennial quest for the woman who would make him "want to die." (He's now studying urban engineering in Switzerland, which I guess was the closest thing to an equivalent he could wangle.)

Agee sums it up at characteristic length:

"I would have done anything in the world for her (that is always characteristic, I guess, of the seizure of the strongest love you can feel: pity, and the wish to die for a person, because there isn't anything you can do for them that is at all measurable to your love), and all I could do, the very most, for this girl who was so soon going on out of my existence into so hopeless a one of hers, the very most I could do was not to show all I cared for her and for what she was saying, and not to even try to do, or to indicate the good I wished I might do her and was so utterly helpless to do."

It's a logical, not an "illogical," extreme. Also the inspiration for a really wretched Bryan Adams song.