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by
D.T. Max
Read between
March 22 - March 28, 2023
But Wallace wanted to tell Pietsch that he was never going to let the reader settle on one. Infinite Jest was meant to be a failed entertainment, not a potted amusement.
If further stuff needs to be cut I’m apt not to fight but to ask for an enormous amount of help, because everything in it’s connected to everything else, at least in my head. The whole thing may be incoherent for all I know. At this point I have no idea. It’s like not knowing what your family looks like: you live right up close to something so long and it blinds you. I just want it done.
sad, senseless attempts by Americans to amuse themselves in the absence of any larger spiritual idea. “Choose with care,” Marathe warns in Infinite Jest. “You are what you love. No?” Wallace’s cruise ship piece was about the price of failing to choose well.
The word “despair” is overused and banalized now, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. It’s close to what people call dread or angst, but it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I’m small and weak and selfish and going, without doubt, to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.8
To read Infinite Jest was to accept a dare.
Political worry was replaced by economic abundance. Americans had never felt more masterful than in the mid-1990s, living in the space between the Cold War and the time of ill-defined threats that was to come.
we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?
The book is at once a meditation on the pain of adolescence, the pleasures of intoxication, the perils of addiction, the price of isolation, and the precariousness of sanity.
I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk about anything.
and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.
how to live meaningfully in the present.
Without God
As the culture collapsed into the anecdote and sound bite, Infinite Jest was one of the few books that seemed to anticipate the change and even prepare the reader for it. It suggested that literary sense might emerge from the coming cultural shifts, possibly even meanings too diffused to see before.
The chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” paralleled Wallace’s portrait of a generation addicted to media with its assertion that everyone was “stupid and contagious…. Here we are now, entertain us.”
uncomfortable but sincere realism for a world that was no longer real.
the year after he won the Lannan, the MacArthur Foundation gave him an award of $230,000, which, together with the Lannan money and the income from his books, effectively freed him from the need to teach.
Faith was something he could admire in others but never quite countenance for himself. He liked to paraphrase Bertrand Russell that there were certain philosophical issues he could bear to think about only for a few minutes a year and once told his old Arizona sponsor Rich C. that he couldn’t go to church because “I always get the giggles.” 11
These men are aware of themselves as over-the-hill, culturally disempowered, on their way to nowhere, especially vis-à-vis women.
“Good Old Neon” is the only story in Oblivion explicitly about a suicide, but many in the collection have a tamped-down sense of doom, of thoughts distorted by words and words constrained by personality and personality deformed by culture.
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 us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.
Existential Angst
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about the mind being “an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
Over the past twenty-five years his mental life had run a huge circuit through the most astonishing complexities to arrive at what many six-year-olds and nearly all churchgoers already understood.
The current danger was not from total immersion but from relentless fragmentation, not from watching one video to death but from skipping among hundreds. Americans were now not passively but frenetically entertained, and the warning shot turned out to be not Wallace as a child, glued to the four stations of 1960s Urbana, but Wallace in Bloomington, clicking among seventy-five channels of satellite TV, unable to decide which show to watch lest he miss a better one. Instinctively, Wallace was wary of the emerging technology.
Infinite Jest’s debt to other literature was perhaps an easier way to start, from Gödel, Escher, Bach to Tristram Shandy and, of course, Hamlet.
After Green left, Wallace went into the garage and turned on the lights. He wrote her a two-page note. Then he crossed through the house to the patio, where he climbed onto a chair and hanged himself.
