Appreciation: David Foster Wallace

One of the most vexing frustrations of the human condition is the fact that we are forever caged inside our own minds. Love, romantic and familial, and friendship, bring us as close as we ever get to inhabiting the soul of another, to see the world through others' eyes.

Reading is only other thing that comes close. A lot of reading is done to acquire information, to satisfy curiosity, to while away time, or engage in escape. But the rarest and most elevated experience a reader can have is to feel, briefly, in contact with another mind. To see one's one inchoate sentiments articulated so precisely, that our own inescapable and endemic solitude momentarily lifts. It's a profound connection. We can probably all name authors we feel this way about, and for me David Foster Wallace was that first and foremost. That's why I cried last night when I learned that he had committed suicide at age 46.

I read Infinite Jest, the summer between high school and college and it blew my mind. I loved it so much I returned to it again while living in Italy in 2000. I devoured his short story and non-fiction collections. (Stop what you're doing and go read the title piece in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.) My senior year of college I adapted his brilliant (and under appreciated) book, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men for the stage. One of the actors in it was John Krasinski (of TV's The Office), who is now making a movie version of the book. As much as any single writer and thinker, Wallace shaped my own sensibility. And I always held out hope that I'd meet him one day.

Wallace's project, which he lays out pretty clearly in this 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, was empathy. And as a hyper-brilliant mind, the path he took towards it, in his writing, was to use his raw intellectual horsepower to achieve a kind of moral enlightenment. There was, in this way, a merging of form and content: his writing worked because he was able to achieve this kind of brilliant, self-conscious, painfully self-aware, but nonetheless robust and heart-breaking empathy for his characters and subjects. And as a reader, the prose itself made one feel a similar kind of soul connection to both the writer and the people the writer described. He felt close. His characters felt close. And reading him I found that the prison bars of my own embedded subjectivity, my own selfish "default setting" was shaken, bent, expanded just enough to be able to glimpse something eternally, capital-T True. Something sublime.

His loss is an unimaginable tragedy.

Comments (7)

1. The commencement address at Kenyon College is the single most perceptive, empathetic and thoughtful piece on the human condition that I have ever read. Humans view reality and base opinions on reality from vastly different prisms and understandably many (the vast majority actually) do not view reality nor base opinions on reality in a way that David did. Doesn't make anyone a better or worse person than anyone else. Nor is it a bad or good thing it is just a- "thing". But for those whose prism is similar to David's, the Kenyon College piece offers hope and brings us just a that much closer to whatever it is we are seeking. For me it brings me closer in that the collection of ideas within that speech comes closer to explaining the meaning of life than anything I have previously been presented. And for that, I am grateful beyond words. For those whose prism is different from David's, I hope that you have found or will find soon your "Kenyon College Speech". David was right, "this is water". David, I hope you can finally daydream. You deserve it.

   Posted by clj at 09/14/2008 @ 4:26pm

2. Let me start by expressing my sympathy for the loss of someone who clearly had a lot going on that was profoundly worthwhile.

   I'm not ashamed to admit that even as someone reasonably well read I hadn't yet encountered David Foster Wallace's major material. But I'll be remedying that in the near future I'm sure. From my brief perusal here and elsewhere it appears that we just lost a potentially dynamic figure for the future --a future increasingly in need of dynamos.

   It's interesting to me that Wallace apparently felt that C.S. Lewis', "The Screwtape Letters", was his favorite novel since Lewis is what I cut my teeth on as an early teen. Some of that is now incorporated into my intellectual DNA although I'd been steered there by my older brother (a newly converted Christian), and I don't personally subscribe to any religious creed per se.

   Screwtape and Wormwood are there as well as my own favorite, "Out of the Silent Planet" with its vision of another world and its strange menagerie of fascinating creatures including the Hrossa, Sorns and Pfifltriggi. It sparked its own unique flame in my psyche.

   In any case, where I stand now philosophically in the barest terms is that humankind must find a way to maintain compassion, communication and empathy in the crosshairs of any future society that might be considered worthwhile to inhabit.

   My sense in the instance of someone who treads the paths that Wallace traveled, a burden of severe psychic pain is a likely price --particularly in light of the yawning chasm between the hoped for and the vulgarity of the immediately at hand.

   If that's the case we might find solace in that he's clearly not alone.

   Posted by b_kool_66 at 09/14/2008 @ 6:57pm

3. I didn't want to forget to say thanks, Chris Hayes, for the door opening post.

   :D

   Posted by b_kool_66 at 09/14/2008 @ 7:09pm

4. After reading and being so inspired and provoked by the Commencement Address, it is so very difficult to accept that the exclamation point to this life was suicide; that the capital T - Truth for David was to choose to exit what he ferverently believed in and promoted.

   Was it all a lie?

   Posted by Arty at 09/14/2008 @ 10:20pm

5. You write: "One of the most vexing frustrations of the human condition is the fact that we are forever caged inside our own minds."

   Neither could that be one of the most vexing frustrations (as would be, say, helplessly watching your child die from a fatal disease or attack), nor is it true. We are not forever caged inside our own minds. Perhaps you're very young and haven't realized it yet, but in any event, grand pronouncements like that are mere empty hyperbole, and therefore inappropriate in this context.

   You write: "His loss is an unimaginable tragedy."

   David Foster Wallace hasn't lost anything; we have. And although our (and his family's) loss is real, and painful, and may even be a tragedy, it is definitely not an _unimaginable_ tragedy. Since it has already occurred, there's of course need to try to imagine it. But more to the point, had you tried to imagine it a few days ago, you'd certainly have been able to do so.

   I too am sorry that Wallace is gone. If he was unhappy or disturbed or in pain before he died (suicide -- if that's in fact what it was -- is not necessarily motivated by any of those mental states; it may simply be the best, or most logical, or least preposterous thing to do next), I'm sorry that he suffered. And I'm sorry you're sad and that you cried. I'm sad, too.

   Heartfelt condolences to all.

   Posted by laorencha at 09/15/2008 @ 07:41am

6. To Arty: Simply, no, it wasn't all a lie. This is someone who was wracked by a truly horrible depression, one that was medicated for 20 years before the side effects became too much. This morning's NYTimes full obit makes it clear that Wallace had been suffering tremendously for the last year or so and had even undergone electro-convulsive shock treatment this summer. I cannot imagine the depths of what he suffered, but it seems a miracle at all that he lived as long, and wrote as well, as he managed to.

   Posted by 06jam_2 at 09/15/2008 @ 5:51pm

7. Ugh. what is it with you people and artistic addicts. The guy was an addict. He didn't go to meetings. Now he is dead. His work is meaningless compared to his life. He was 46. Evertime a creative person dies as a result of addiction the MSM memorializes his work disregarding the disease that killed him. How about saying he was a drug addict who did not receive proper treatment instead of romantasizing it in the same way as Hemmingway, Kerouac, Bukowski - all dead from addiction. Its enough already. It makes me sick.

   Posted by HollywoodMark at 09/17/2008 @ 8:11pm