…are far more talented than I.
I’m an avid reader.
I gain more respect for novelists by the day.
The time, the dedication, the perseverance…it is staggering.
I’ve always wanted to write one.
I type in fits and starts, and then I move on to something else.
I’m not sure it’s a mountain I’ll ever climb.
My roommate scurried in from the wet weather with a crinkled bundle of photocopied papers under his arm. He plopped the thick pile of pages on the coffee table, and disappeared to his room.
Thirty minutes later, I’d finished watching “The Year of Living Dangerously”, and out of curiosity, lifted the ramshackle pile onto my lap, and began reading.
The pages appeared to be a photocopy of an article from Harper’s magazine - it was a first hand account of “the cruise ship experience” - the author’s name was David Foster Wallace, and the level of detail in his writing amazed me.
After eight pages I decided to come up for air, briefly, before I dove back in and devoured the remaining seventeen pages or so. Never before had I been so thrilled with the written word…I told myself I had just discovered my new favorite writer. I vowed to learn everything about this Harper’s journalist Wallace.
Later that evening, I mentioned to my roommate that I’d read the article he’d left sitting on the coffee table…and I remember stating how remarkable I found this author Wallace to be. My roommate concurred, and then proceeded to tell me that the man had killed himself the previous night.
I cannot remember a time where I’d felt as remorseful over the loss of a complete stranger as I had with David Foster Wallace. I think the kick to the gut was made especially brutal in my case because I had literally just finished reading the article from Harper’s, and had my mind blown by a paradigm-shifting writer that - thanks to my remarkably self-absorbed ignorance - I had never heard of before, let alone known that for some time, he was an “important” novelist, journalist, and short story writer considered by many as the “greatest in a generation”.
Learning of Wallace’s death, and that it occurred mere hours prior to the time that I’d first learned of who he was, had the effect of making me feel cheated in some way. I felt as though I had cheated myself for not pointing my hyper-aware sensitivities in the direction of contemporary fiction…for not picking up a copy of Harper’s more often. I used to take pride in being a nerd, and now I’d found that I was nowhere nerd enough…it’s a disorienting feeling. I also felt remorse for the world at large.
I’ve thought before that if you took an aggregate of all the known living human world, and were to chart it as some kind of index…with a value of say, eleven…the loss of David Foster Wallace easily brought this down to ten and-a-half. The man had a level of awareness with which I can only half comprehend. His mind saw things in full 1080p, while mine continues to chug along with the standard 460 lines of resolution. The world lost a powerfully observational mind in DFW…and as sad as I felt for his family, friends, and fans…I felt equally so for the world, or perhaps worry - maybe even dread, is a more apt descriptor for the emotion I felt for humanity.
As I was shaken from my cynical, glazed-over, hypnotic conveyor belt trance this exponentially modernizing sound-bite of a world imposes upon us by Wallace’s writing…part of the excitement I felt in digesting his thoughts resided in the comfort-inducing knowledge that this staggeringly astute mind was “out there”, somewhere in the ether, breaking everything down to its essential nuts and bolts. Wallace’s mind was capable of eviscerating the fog that envelops most of world in the clouded mind of a dumbed-down farm animal like myself, and the rest of our lowest common denominators. Realizing that this giant intellect - this voice that speaks about the world to me in a way I cannot properly articulate - was no longer accessible, at the very moment of my finally arriving upon its doorstep…it was just heartbreaking.
Vain as this entire recounting is, I admit I also take comfort knowing that I discovered Wallace on my own…perhaps with a little push from the universe, yes…but I think it’d be slightly crass to have come to know about him, his immense talent, and his writing AFTER learning of his death. Imagine, if I had heard about DFW’s suicide prior to reading any of his work or learning of him…the significance of the tragic occurrence might have been completely lost on me - the impact would not have been felt, and I would likely never have “discovered” him…nor would my paradigm have been shifted at a time when the change was so badly needed.
RIP, DFW…
“what do you think of these boots?”
“let’s be the next big thing!”
“I’m worried for my future.”
“I see storm clouds on the horizon.”
“For you, or for us?”
“Do you think of me?”
“Of course, I want to find someone just like you. I want to find you.”
“There’s nothing out there for me.”
“There’s no one out there for me either.”
“Ontario messed up the world with this,”
“You guys bankrupted Iceland.”
‘In the past, runs on banks took time as people left their homes, drove or walked to a branch and stood in line to withdraw money, Taleb said. Now, a run can be accomplished in seconds via the Internet and phones with Web-browsing capabilities like the BlackBerry, he said.
“In no time, Iceland is history,” Taleb said.’
1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other’s false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning —called also Socratic irony
2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance
3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic irony
synonyms see wit
