The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody.

not to mention the dramatically increased popularity of the memoir as a literary genre.

Fact: The birth agonies of the New IRS led to one of the great and terrible PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble.

knowing it was the fear that was the problem was just a fact; it didn’t make the fear go away.

I remember once, in I think 1975 or ’76, shaving off just one sideburn and going around like that for a period of time, believing the one sideburn made me a nonconformist—I’m not kidding—and getting into long, serious conversations with girls at parties who would ask me what the lone sideburn ‘meant.’

In other words, I was only pretending to ask her a question—I was actually giving the girlfriend a condescending little lecture on people’s narcissism and illusion of uniqueness,

I know I was nearly always the hero of any story or incident I ever told people about during this period—which, like the thing with the lone sideburn, is a memory that makes me almost wince now.

‘To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress—this will happen, mark me.

Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.

‘Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand?

Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.’

The idea was that I would mail the book back to this immediate relative a week or two hence, along with a voluble thank-you note filled with the gestures and tactics the book recommended—such as e.g. using the person’s first name over and over again, emphasizing areas of agreement and shared enthusiasm, & c.—the

Coffee wasn’t allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he’d have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he imagined himself running around the outside grounds shouting. He knew what he’d really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and despite prayers and effort sit counting the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again.

It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

He’s the sort of person you’d have to look at very intently even to be able to describe.

which he could call honesty and get extra jollies hurting people’s feelings.

Everyone has unconscious mannerisms they fall into on a telephone; hers was to look at the cuticles of the hand that didn’t hold the phone and to use that hand’s thumb to feel at each cuticle in turn.

Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.