The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

One note says the novel is “a series of setups for things to happen but nothing ever happens.”

David set out to write a novel about some of the hardest subjects in the world—sadness and boredom—and to make that exploration nothing less than dramatic, funny, and deeply moving.

It was true: The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

He knew who on the plane was in love, who would say they were in love because it was what you were supposed to say, and who would say they were not in love.

He frequently had this feeling: What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn’t wrong with other people?

Each car not only parked by a different human individual but conceived, designed, assembled from parts each one of which was designed and made, transported, sold, financed, purchased, and insured by human individuals, each with life stories and self-concepts that all fit together into a larger pattern of facts.

He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing.

and then how to arrive and check in and where to store his three bags while he checked in and filled out his arrival and Post-code payroll and withholding forms and orientational materials then somehow get directions and proceed to the apartment that Systems had rented for him at government rates and get there in time to find someplace to eat that was either in walking distance or would require getting another cab—except

Incredible, how normal and mundane all of these feelings are

and she always smelled very good and clean, like someone you could trust and deeply care about even if you weren’t in love.

He was desperate to be good people, to still be able to feel he was good.

Naive people are, more or less by definition, unaware that they’re naive. (1b) I was, in retrospect, naive.

The paradox of plagiarism is that it actually requires a lot of care and hard work to pull off successfully,

Of course popularity is, in this context, a synonym for profitability;

If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine [his] whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity.

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.

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.

And now ever since that time have noticed, at work and in recreation and time with friends and even the intimacies of family life, that living people do not speak much of the dull.

It took a while to realize he did this with the lawn because he liked the feeling of being done.

Each completed one gives you that solid little feeling.

The joy of knowing you finished something

We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?’

‘Sometimes what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes the important things aren’t works of art for your entertainment, X.’

‘People saying those damned tobacco companies while they smoke.’

‘Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that

everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than “die,” “pass away,” the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday—’

‘And not only that, but everybody

who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try

imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little ...

‘This is supposed to be news to us. News flash: We’...

that he is the tree, that his first responsibility is to his own happiness, that everyone else is the great gray abstract mass which his life depends on standing apart from, being an individual, being happy.’

You make buying a certain brand of clothes or pop or car or necktie into a gesture of the same level of ideological significance as wearing a beard or protesting the war.’

The way adolescents make a big deal of rebelling against parental authority while they borrow the keys to Daddy’s car and use Daddy’s credit card to fill it with gas. The new leader won’t lie to the people; he’ll do what corporate pioneers have discovered works far better: He’ll adopt the persona and rhetoric that let the people lie to themselves.’

remember everyone despising Gerald Ford, not so much for pardoning Nixon but for constantly falling down. Everyone had contempt for him. Very blue designer jeans. I remember the feminist tennis player Billie Jean King beating what seemed like an old and feeble man player on television and my mother and her friends all being very excited by this. ‘Male chauvinist pig,’ ‘women’s lib,’ and ‘stagflation’ all seemed vague and indistinct to me during this time, like listening to background noise with half an ear. I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards. I never did anything, but at the same time I could normally never sit still and become aware of what was really going on. It’s hard to explain. I somewhat remember a younger Cronkite, Barbara Walters, and Harry Reasoner—I don’t think I watched much news. Again, I suspect this was more typical than I thought at the time. One thing you learn in Rote Exams is how disorganized and inattentive most people are and how little they

pay attention to what’s going on outside of their sphere.

I wonder if anyone feels as though they’re the same person they seem to remember.

that I was just as much a conformist as he was, plus a hypocrite, a ‘rebel’ who really just sponged off of society in the form of his parents.

At the same time, sometimes I know I worried about my directionlessness and lack of initiative, how abstract and open to different interpretations everything seemed at the time, even about how fuzzy and pointless my memories were starting to seem.

In hindsight, I realized later that my father was actually kind of witty and sophisticated.

In short, there was probably much more to him than I was aware of, and I don’t remember even realizing how little I knew about him, really, until after he was gone and it was too late.

I was now not only in the room, but I was aware that I was in the room.

because I never really looked at anything in a precise, attentive way.

It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, the fact that it’s a choice.

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.

What it means to be alive

For myself, I tend to do my most important thinking in incidental, accidental, almost daydreamy ways.

suddenly you find you’re thinking about things that end up being important.

don’t think my father loved his job with the city, but on the other hand, I’m not sure he ever asked himself major questions like ‘Do I like my job? Is this really what I want to spend my life doing? Is it as fulfilling as some of the dreams I had for myself when I was a young man serving in Korea and reading British poetry in my bunk in the barracks at night?’ He had a family to support, this was his job, he got up every day and did it, end of story, everything else is just self-indulgent nonsense.

My own dad

But freedom of this kind is also very close, on the psychological continuum, to loneliness.

‘Real freedom is freedom to obey the law.’

I never really talked to either of my parents about how they felt about their adult lives. It’s just not the sort of thing that parents sit down and openly discuss with their children, at least not in that era.

Anyhow, it was also at this time that my father was killed unexpectedly in a CTA subway accident in Chicago,

I wonder if DFW father is actually dead