pretty sure i've talked about david foster wallace here before. he hung himself last friday. he was 46, so he beat hemingway by a decade and a half. this certainly wasn't my first reaction but it was a reaction: he certainly didn't seem like the kind of guy for which "attempted" suicide would apply. rather much more detail-oriented than to fail at really anything he tried. also not my first reaction but less whimsical and therefore more instructive of my overall reaction: there is an absolutely spectacular passage in infinite jest where he describes in first-person an attempted suicide by drug overdose. i've never attempted it myself but the hazy disconnect between human-brain, human-human, and human-world was so well-done it was literally chilling for me to read it. i don't know how you respond to books or written words but finishing reading that passage was maybe the only time in my life where i had to stop and put the book away. it was too much and i just had to stop for the day. too much. it's something the very same character says and something of a melancholic motto for me. it's also a central theme of the book, which might be all the explanation that's required in conveying my love for it. i'm not going to take this time to do any sort of intelligent review of infinite jest, not least because any thoughts on it necessarily can't be separated from the so-recent demise of its author, but i can say with measured emotion that it's one of the handful of best books i've ever read and maybe the best book since the spread of modernism. actually if you've read much of his own opinions of literature you'd agree that it can be silly to compare works with regard to literary era or even to label such eras, so maybe i ought to simply stick with my first statement and leave it at that.
that a man has died is not of much consequence to me. people come and go all the time, and, while it's perhaps pretentious for a 27-year-old to act flippant on the subject, i currently possess neither the disposition nor the experience to philosophize any deeper. what's personally interesting is the depression and obviously therefore the disconnection present in this man that could cause such an outcome. to write as he did requires an incomprehensibly huge amount of emotional depth. to truthfully express both exultant and utterly despairing feelings through mere words requires a man to possess a dangerously massive range of emotions, and therefore all the subsequent vulnerabilities that come with them. i guess i'm saying that suicide from such a person as this should not ever be a surprising result. tragic of course, but not surprising.
there are people--artisans of various types--that transcend simple human existence through their ability to create fully-formed existances for others. these people don't really exist simply as people, as private entities; they belong to the world that they've rendered almost obsolete. i would personally consider bob dylan another such person. he's not who he was born as, he's something else now. wallace i consider similarly. and that's why it's tragic to lose him. more interestingly, though, that's why it's difficult to understand his discontinued existence. here is someone that beat the system, someone who became for the world around him something more than simply alive. so how could he be dead? his output is and will always be alive, it's the creation that has died. or dried up. i don't know. maybe i'm getting carried away but it makes sense to me to think this way.
something else that's somewhat personal about all this is that when you really understand a book or a writer it is impossible not to feel a real connection, as if you know the person. writing and sharing words is an incredibly intimate activity, both for the giver and the receiver. as with every literary consideration, wallace certainly understood this. it makes you wonder if the stress involved in exposing parts of himself was just too much to bear. or, further, if the acknowledgement of his own genius and his own transcendence was too much for his mortal cognition. i know this all seems pretty heady and that real people don't think this way but if there is one person who would have it was him.
it's too bad what happened but in a way it was inevitable. too much. he was too much.
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