The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

There was also the word mellow that was used constantly, although even early on in its use this word bugged me; I just didn’t like it. I still probably used it sometimes, though, without being aware I was doing it.

The more fragmented the memory is, though, the more it seems to feel authentically mine, which is strange. I wonder if anyone feels as though they’re the same person they seem to remember. It would probably make them have a nervous breakdown. It probably wouldn’t even make any sense.

If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.

not only do I sort of dislike Steve, which in all honesty I do, but part of the reason I dislike him is that when I listen to him on the phone it makes me see similarities and realize things about myself that embarrass me, but I don’t know how to quit doing them—like, if I quit trying to seem nihilistic, even just to myself, then what would happen, what would I be like?

part of me had chosen to room with Steve Edwards because part of me actually sort of enjoyed disliking him and cataloguing things about him that were hypocritical and made me feel a sort of embarrassed distaste, and that there must be certain psychological reasons why I lived, ate, partied, and hung around with a person I didn’t even really like or respect very much… which probably meant that I didn’t respect myself very much, either, and that was why I was such a conformist.

I think that abusing these drugs was a valuable experience for me, as I was basically so feckless and unfocused during this period that I needed a very clear, blunt type of hint that there was much more to being an alive, responsible, autonomous adult than I had any idea of at the time.

I remember not getting Camus’s The Fall read in time, for instance, and having to totally bullshit my way through the Literature of Alienation midterm—in other words, I was cheating, at least by implication—but not feeling much about it one way or the other, that I can recall, except a sort of cynical, disgusted relief when the prof’s grader wrote something like ‘Interesting in places!’ under the B. Meaning a meaningless bullshit response to meaningless bullshit.

I’m not the smartest person, but even during that whole pathetic, directionless period, I think that deep down I knew that there was more to my life and to myself than just the ordinary psychological impulses for pleasure and vanity that I let drive me. That there were depths to me that were not bullshit or childish but profound, and were not abstract but actually much realer than my clothes or self-image, and that blazed in an almost sacred way—I’m being serious; I’m not just trying to make it sound more dramatic than it was—and that these realest, most profound parts of me involved not drives or appetites but simple attention, awareness, if only I could stay awake off speed. But I couldn’t.

In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human.