If two different lines are both horizontal, they are parallel; and yet, in projective geometry, they meet, at the point at infinity. David Foster Wallace was asked in a 1996 interview about the ending of Infinite Jest, which many people found abrupt: Did he, the interviewer asked, avoid writing an ending because he “just got tired of writing it”? Wallace replied, rather testily: “There is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kinds of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an ‘end’ can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such
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