Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

by D.T. Max

Does our understanding of what we experience derive from objective reality or from cognitive limitations within us? Is language a window or a cage?

In the age of media, we are nothing but minds waiting to be filled, emotions waiting to be manipulated. There is a sense—again brought to full boil in Infinite Jest—that our obsession with being entertained has deadened our affect, that we are not, as a character warns in that book, choosing carefully enough what to love. And

“I think I made it a project not to look in the mirror during that party,” he later told an interviewer, “because I knew that a whole lot of other people were looking at me, and if I thought about what I looked like, I was going to go crazy.”

Is it not normal to have your whole day ruined by catching sight of yourself in a mirror or a shop window?

“She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the ‘me’ she seemed so jealously to covet.”