The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

One of the quirks of real human memory is that the most vivid, detailed recall doesn’t usually concern the things that are most germane. The as it were forest. It’s not just that real memory is fragmentary; I think it’s also that overall relevance and meaning are conceptual, while the experiential bits that get locked down and are easiest, years later, to retrieve tend to be sensory. We live inside bodies, after all.