The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day.

Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress.

The sun overhead like a peephole into hell’s own self-consuming heart.

abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting.

To me, at least in retrospect,26 the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us27 spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly… but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows28 it’s about something else, way down.

Alicui tamen faciendum est,

"He is the one doing a difficult, unpopular job."

My overall memory of this cocaine period was of being at some kind of party with someone on cocaine who kept talking to me in this very rapid, intense way, and of me trying to subtly back away, and of every time I take a step backwards they take a step forwards, and so on and so forth, until they’ve backed me against a wall of the party and my back is literally up against the wall and they’re talking very fast only inches from my face, which was something I didn’t like at all. This actually happened at parties during this period.

I’d be sitting there in a room and become aware of how much effort it was to pay attention to just your own heartbeat for more than a minute or so—it’s almost as though your heartbeat wants to stay out of awareness, like a rock star avoiding the limelight.

I think the truth is probably that enormous, sudden, dramatic, unexpected, life-changing experiences are not translatable or explainable to anyone else, and this is because they really are unique and particular—though not unique in the way the Christian girl believed. This is because their power isn’t just a result of the experience itself, but also of the circumstances in which it hits you, of everything in your previous life-experience which has led up to it and made you exactly who and what you are when the experience hits you.

I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry. I do not recall the things I worried about, but I remember the feeling, and it was an anxiety whose lack of a proper object is what made it horrible, free-floating.

my father was the beaten but obdurate warrior—ground down every day in a campaign whose pointlessness was part of its corrosive power.

obdurate - adjective - stubbornly refusing to change one's opinion or course of action.

The young men were the worst, some actual martinets, depressed and bitter, because the idealism that had brought them to us was no match for the petrified bureaucracy of the Columbus School System or the listless passivity of children they’d dreamed of inspiring (read, indoctrinating) to a soft liberalism (peace was a big word with these men) that would replicate and flatter their own, children who were instead locked tight inside themselves and an institutional tedium they couldn’t name but had already lost their hearts to.

martinet - a strict disciplinarian, especially in the armed forces.

The air-conditioning was more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning.

Not to mention the sheer strangeness of having it be (it emerged) the REC’s mammoth rear facing Peoria’s main orbital road. It seemed, on slow approach, both craven and arrogant, like pre-modern priests who faced away from the communicants during Catholic mass.

The understanding of himself as also an object-for-others was in his case deferred to the very cusp of adulthood—and, like most repressed truths, when it finally burst through, it came as something overwhelming and terrible, a winged thing breathing fire.