Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self. I am not even here, possibly, for listening to.’

Hal wonders, not for the first time, whether he might deep down be a secret snob about collar-color issues and Pemulis, then whether the fact that he’s capable of wondering whether he’s a snob attenuates the possibility that he’s really a snob.

Sobriety in Boston is regarded as less a gift than a sort of cosmic loan. You can’t pay the loan back, but you can pay it forward, by spreading the message that despite all appearances AA works, spreading this message to the next new guy who’s tottered in to a meeting and is sitting in the back row unable to hold his cup of coffee. The only way to hang onto sobriety is to give it away, and even just 24 hours of sobriety is worth doing anything for, a sober day being nothing short of a daily miracle if you’ve got the Disease like he’s got the Disease, says the Advanced Basics member who’s chairing this evening’s Commitment, saying just a couple public words to the hall before he opens the meeting and retires to a stool next to the podium and calls his Group’s speakers by random lot.

It’s all optional; do it or die.

Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti- interesting?

An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church.

somehow even worse—there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear.

This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them.

abon26-MEMBER EEC ACCUSES U.S. OF ‘EXPERIALIST DOMINATION’—Header; THIRD-WORLD VEGETABLES HURLED IN U.N. IMBROGLIO—10-point Subheader;

From a historical perspective it’s easy to accuse the Network corporations of being greedy and short-sighted w/r/t explicit liposuction; but Hal argued, with a compassion Mr. Ogilvie found surprising in a seventh-grader, that it’s probably hard to be restrained and far-sighted when you’re fighting against a malignant invasive V&V-backed cable kabal for your very fiscal life, day to day.

Steeply welcomed the subsumption of his dignity and self in the very rôle that offended his dignity of self…

‘The third thing, the goal or desire—it mediated the ill will, abstracted it somehow.’

The way a White Flagger formulates this, e.g., is that 99.9% of what goes on in one’s life is actually none of one’s business, with the .1% under one’s control consisting mostly of the option to accept or deny one’s inevitable powerlessness over the other 99.9%, which just trying to parse this out makes Don Gately’s forehead turn purple.

‘Why this sick thing of making me complicit in these Strategic pursuits when you know I think they’re troubled and sick? It’s like asking somebody to help you culture anthrax or something.’

the Coach was swept away with the athleto-Wagnerian implications of Gentle’s proposals for waste, this business of sending from yourself what you hope will not return.