Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

And then but so what’s the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end? It’s always Schtitt who ends up experimenting with some exotic ice-cream flavor, when they arrive. Mario always chickens out and opts for good old basic chocolate when the moment of decision at the counter comes. Thinking along the lines of like Better the flavor you know for sure you already love. ‘And so. No different, maybe,’ Schtitt concedes, sitting up straight on a waffle-seated aluminum chair with Mario beneath an askew umbrella that makes the flimsy little table it’s rooted to shake and clank in the sidewalk’s breeze. ‘Maybe no different, so,’ biting hard into his tricolored cone. He feels at the side of his white jaw, where there’s some sort of red welt, it looks like. ‘Not different’—looking out into the Ave.’s raised median at the Green Line train rattling past downhill—‘except the chance to play.’ He brightens in preparation to laugh in his startling German roar, saying ‘No? Yes? The chance to play, yes?’ And Mario loses a dollop of chocolate down his chin, because he has this involuntary thing where he laughs whenever anyone else does, and Schtitt is finding what he has just said very amusing indeed.

Possibly the most important section re: the drive of athleticism and E.T.A. philosophy in general. "The chance to play, yes?" is something I've shouted good-naturedly more than once after taking up this book a few times.

Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.

HUGELY SIGNIFICANT

Well now don’t be that way. Son, don’t be that way, now. Don’t get all oversensitive on me, son, when all I’m trying to do is help you. Son, Jim, I hate this when you do this. Your chin just disappears into that bow-tie when your big old overhung lower lip quivers like that. You look chinless, son, and big-lipped. And that cape of mucus that’s coming down on your upper lip, the way it shines, don’t, just don’t, it’s revolting, son, you don’t want to revolt people, you have to learn to control this sort of oversensitivity to hard truths, this sort of thing, take and exert some goddamn control is the whole point

Contrast this with AA's doctrine: you cannot control, you can only accept. Note too how belligerent, ugly, and insensitive JOI's father grows as he moves further into drunkenness and more importantly further into a fruitless grasp for control. Advances themes of addiction, repeating cycles (especially in families), and adds to the characters of JOI and the Incandenza children.

Jogging is painful and pointless, but you are not in charge.

Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost. Have a father whose own father lost what was there. Have a father who lived up to his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn’t seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent. Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play. The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having a prodigious talent to live up to. Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.

This is what to point to when recalling DFW is on record saying he set out to write a sad book.

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary. See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game.

Madame Psychosis has an unironic but generally gloomy outlook on the universe in general.

The word periodic pops into his head.

Wraith sighting? "Periodic" appears again immediately in next paragraph.

That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.

That an important part of halfway-house Human Immuno-Virus prevention is not leaving your razor or toothbrush in communal bathrooms.

Parallel to "don't leave your toothbrush unattended" rule at ETA? Or coincidence?

no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

Later expanded on by Gately in the hospital

That ‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

It’s some kind of anti-ad. To direct attention at what is not said. Lead up to an inevitability you deny. Not new.

Meta-commentary on the book itself, which we see elsewhere (usually w/r/t JOI's filmography). Directing criticisms that IJ was sure to draw at hypothetical fictionalized works in-universe was kind of a baller move.

It all tends to get complicated, and probably not all that interesting—unless you play.

Self-burn!

Schacht always prefers a pleasant match, one way or the other. He really doesn’t care all that much whether he wins anymore, since first the Crohn’s and then the knee at sixteen. He’d probably now describe his desire to win as a preference, nothing more. What’s singular is that his tennis seems to have improved slightly in the two years since he stopped really caring. It’s like his hard flat game stopped having any purpose beyond itself and started feeding on itself and got fuller, looser, its edges less jagged, though everybody else has been improving too, even faster, and Schacht’s rank has been steadily declining since sixteen, and the staff has stopped talking even about a top-college ride. Schtitt’s warmed to him, though, since the knee and the loss of any urge beyond the play itself, and treats Schacht now almost more like a peer than an experimental subject with something at stake.

Schacht is an interesting character: the only one who seems to have transcended The Show and instead plays for the simple pleasure of the game. By not bowing to the stress and pressure of competition, by being by definition separate from that world, he interestingly enough becomes the only real well-adjusted character at E.T.A. and therefore a very important study of character in Wallace's often empty, character-less imagined world. He's also just about the only person besides Mario who helps his fellow man (Pemulis) out of genuine unthinking empathy, and notably the only character who seems to be indifferent towards Substances (what AA would call "a moderate drinker").

If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes to the front office at night to scream that he can’t take it anymore and clutch at Gately’s pantcuff and blubber and beg for help at any cost, Gately’ll get to tell Day the thing is that the clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live by instead of just say. But he’ll only get to say it if Day comes and asks.

Possibly the most important passage in the entire book, vis a vis the Recovery aspect

Time is passing. Ennet House reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety, hanging and palpable. You can hear ticking in clockless rooms here.

A huge parallel to the experience of reading the book itself, written into the text as another meta-signifier: you are reading right now, you are trading your time in exchange for someone else's thoughts.

‘Peace on earth good will toward men,’ says Gately, back on his back, smiling at the dun cracked ceiling. He’s the one who’d farted.

Can we talk about all the fart jokes? Why are there so many fart jokes?

Poor Tony Krause had a seizure on the T.

An extremely poignant line, with the benefit of multiple readings, and contender for biggest understatement.

He was haunted by the word Zuckung, a foreign and possibly Yiddish word he did not recall ever before hearing. The word kept echoing in quick-step cadence through his head without meaning anything.

Another wraith sighting?

Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible.

Key to understanding is the role of discipline in all of this.

‘The rich father who can afford the cost of candy as well as food for his children: but if he cries out “Freedom!” and allows his child to choose only what is sweet, eating only candy, not pea soup and bread and eggs, so his child becomes weak and sick: is the rich man who cries “Freedom!” the good father?’

Another surprisingly significant message in a seemingly throw-away line. This is a concept I've mulled over at length as a new parent.

Your standard round of Eschaton moves at about the pace of chess between adepts. For these devotees become, on court, almost parodically adult—staid, sober, humane, and judicious twelve-year-old world leaders, trying their best not to let the awesome weight of their responsibilities—responsibilities to nation, globe, rationality, ideology, conscience and history, to both the living and the unborn—not to let the terrible agony they feel at the arrival of this day—this dark day the leaders’ve prayed would never come and have taken every conceivable measure rationally consistent with national strategic interest to avoid, to prevent—not to let the agonizing weight of responsibility compromise their resolve to do what they must to preserve their people’s way of life. So they play, logically, cautiously, so earnest and deliberate in their calculations they appear thoroughly and queerly adult, almost Talmudic, from a distance.

The Eschaton scene is beloved by many but takes a good long while to get to the point.

‘It’s snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!’

Pemulis is walking backwards away from the south fence back toward the pavilion and has both arms up in either appeal or fury or something else.

The frustrating ambiguity of a Wallace sentence. I mean, you tell us; you're the author, man!

Hal finds himself riveted at something about the degenerating game that seems so terribly abstract and fraught with implications and consequences that even thinking about how to articulate it seems so complexly stressful that being almost incapacitated with absorption is almost the only way out of the complex stress.

Boston AA is like AA nowhere else on this planet.

From this line allllll the way to the end of page 379 comprises my favorite sections of the book, what I consider the most stirring and poignant emotional displays, and some of the most vivid demonstrations of DFW's "moral" in action - (though I'd concede the "moral" is best summarized by Hal around page 694, when he's talking about Anhedonia and the "hip mask of cynicism"). But here's the point, the Big Idea: in order to live life to the fullest, we all must risk being selfless, honest, empathetic, and active in some kind of community. In this lengthy but impossible-to-ignore section we track Don Gately's understanding of Service and Community in the context of A.A. which for the book's purposes provides a microcosm of the whole universe of human interactions. I love it!

Every night in Boston, bumper-stickered cars full of totally sober people, wall-eyed from caffeine and trying to read illegibly scrawled directions by the dashboard lights, crisscross the city, heading for the church basements or bingo halls or nursing-home cafeterias of other AA Groups, to put on Commitments. Being an active member of a Boston AA Group is probably a little bit like being a serious musician or like athlete, in terms of constant travel.

While this sentiment is absolutely beautiful, the segment as a whole is frustratingly dated - a time when nobody had GPS in their car, let alone smartphones, and a time when you could smoke indoors... a time apart, is what it is, and a time that our author might dangerously be preserving for an audience of future generations that just plain won't get it.

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.

Identifying, unless you’ve got a stake in Comparing, isn’t very hard to do, here. Because if you sit up front and listen hard, all the speakers’ stories of decline and fall and surrender are basically alike,

Both a straightforward comment on AA/addiction/Recovery culture in general and yet also a highly specific reminder that for the purposes of reading this book, every single story is really aiming towards the same point...

Concord’s John L. has a huge hanging gut and just no ass at all, the way some big older guys’ asses seem to get sucked into their body and reappear out front as gut. Gately, in sobriety, does nightly sit-ups out of fear this’ll all of a sudden happen to him, as age thirty approaches.

LOL

then eventually a terrible acknowledgment that some line has been undeniably crossed, and fist-at-the-sky, as-God-is-my-witness vows to buckle down and lick this thing for good, to quit for all time, then maybe a few white-knuckled days of initial success, then a slip, then more pledges, clock-watching, baroque self-regulations, repeated slips back into the Substance’s relief after like two days’ abstinence, ghastly hangovers, head-flattening guilt and self-disgust, superstructures of additional self-regulations (e.g. not before 0900h. not on a worknight, only when the moon is waxing, only in the company of Swedes) which also fail— ‘When I was drunk I wanted to get sober and when I was sober I wanted to get drunk,’ John L. says; ‘I lived that way for years, and I submit to you that’s not livin, that’s a fuckin death-in-life.’

In all honesty, much of this very section is more resonant and powerful to me than the official AA literature and "Big Book" -- though I'd have to admit IJ is especially potent at getting that first-step work done, but a lot is left to be desired w/r/t long-term sobriety.

then, finally, no relief available anywhere at all; finally it’s impossible to get high enough to freeze what you feel like, being this way; and now you hate the Substance, hate it, but you still find yourself unable to stop doing it, the Substance, you find you finally want to stop more than anything on earth and it’s no fun doing it anymore and you can’t believe you ever liked doing it and but you still can’t stop, it’s like you’re totally fucking bats, it’s like there’s two yous; and when you’d sell your own dear Mum to stop and still, you find, can’t stop, then the last layer of jolly friendly mask comes off your old friend the Substance, it’s midnight now and all masks come off, and you all of a sudden see the Substance as it really is, for the first time you see the Disease as it really is, really has been all this time, you look in the mirror at midnight and see what owns you, what’s become what you are— ‘A fuckin livin death, I tell you it’s not being near alive, by the end I was undead, not alive, and I tell you the idea of dyin was nothing compared to the idea of livin like that for another five or ten years and only then dyin,’ with audience heads nodding in rows like a wind-swept meadow; boy can they ever Identify. —and then you’re in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain...

OOOOOOOOhhhhhaaaaaggghhhhwwwwoooooaaaahhhggghhh! This becomes so relatable it HURTS! This is the section to point to when anybody ever says, "Well DFW was sexist" and "Infinite Jest was closeminded" --- any and all criticism has to melt away and bow down when faced with such a visceral and honest confession of psychic pain.

If you listen for the similarities, all these speakers’ Substance-careers seem to terminate at the same cliff’s edge. You are now Finished, as a Substance-user. It’s the jumping-off place. You now have two choices. You can either eliminate your own map for keeps—blades are the best, or else pills, or there’s always quietly sucking off the exhaust pipe of your repossessable car in the bank-owned garage of your familyless home. Something whimpery instead of banging. Better clean and quiet and (since your whole career’s been one long futile flight from pain) painless.

Jesus, this is a helluva downer... True, but still - seriously sad

that has left her rabidly Christian—rabidly, as in foam—so that she’s comparatively ignored and avoided, though her AA story, being just like everybody else’s but more spectacular, has become metro Boston AA myth.

"Just like everybody else's [story] but more spectacular" -- that's kind of another good description of IJ as a whole.

by now you literally have no other choices besides trying this AA thing or else eliminating your map, so you spend the day killing every last bit of every Substance you’ve got in one last joyless bitter farewell binge

Recalling, of course, Erdedy from the very beginning.

And this, at root, is what unites Boston AA: it turns out this same resigned, miserable, brainwash-and-exploit-me-if-that’s-what-it-takes-type desperation has been the jumping-off place for just about every AA you meet, it emerges, once you’ve actually gotten it up to stop darting in and out of the big meetings and start walking up with your wet hand out and trying to actually personally meet some Boston AAs.

Again: beautiful and 100% accurate evocation of a true-to-life feeling that you'd otherwise have to be there to experience

You are not unique, they’ll say: this initial hopelessness unites every soul in this broad cold salad-bar’d hall. They are like Hindenburg-survivors. Every meeting is a reunion, once you’ve been in for a while.

Substances start out being so magically great, so much the interior jigsaw’s missing piece, that at the start you just know, deep in your gut, that they’ll never let you down; you just know it. But they do. And then this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharin grins and hideous coffee is so lame you just know there’s no way it could ever possibly work except for the utterest morons… and then Gately seems to find out AA turns out to be the very loyal friend he thought he’d had and then lost, when you Came In. And so you Hang In and stay sober and straight, and out of sheer hand-burned-on-hot-stove terror you heed the improbable-sounding warnings not to stop pounding out the nightly meetings even after the Substance-cravings have left and you feel like you’ve got a grip on the thing at last and can now go it alone, you still don’t try to go it alone, you heed the improbable warnings because by now you have no faith in your own sense of what’s really improbable and what isn’t, since AA seems, improbably enough, to be working, and with no faith in your own senses you’re confused, flummoxed, and when people with AA time strongly advise you to keep coming you nod robotically and keep coming, and you sweep floors and scrub out ashtrays and fill stained steel urns with hideous coffee, and you keep getting ritually down on your big knees every morning and night asking for help from a sky that still seems a burnished shield against all w...

Oh, just O.M.G. - this particular passage is so beautiful in its clunky forthright honesty that it hurts, after multiple re-reads and after years of trying to stay sober, it just hurts because it's so resonantly honest and true.

Gately’s biggest asset as an Ennet House live-in Staffer—besides the size thing, which is not to be discounted when order has to be maintained in a place where guys come in fresh from detox still in Withdrawal with their eyes rolling like palsied cattle and an earring in their eyelid and a tattoo that says BORN TO BE UNPLEASANT—besides the fact that his upper arms are the size of cuts of beef you rarely see off hooks, his big plus is he has this ability to convey his own experience about at first hating AA to new House residents who hate AA and resent being forced to go and sit up in nose-pore-range and listen to such limply improbable clichéd drivel night after night.

Just - come on, now, this is just - just too spot-on to be anything but applauded.

he, Gately, had perked up considerably at 30 days clean when he found he could raise his big mitt in Beginner Meetings and say publicly just how much he hates this limp AA drivel about gratitude and humility and miracles and how he hates it and thinks it’s horseshit and hates the AAs and how they all seem like limp smug moronic self-satisfied shit-eating pricks with their lobotomized smiles and goopy sentiment and how he wishes them all violent technicolor harm in the worst way, new Gately sitting there spraying vitriol, wet-lipped and red-eared, trying to get kicked out, purposely trying to outrage the AAs into giving him the boot so he could quick-march back to Ennet House and tell crippled Pat Montesian and his counselor Gene M. how he’d been given the boot at AA, how they’d pleaded for honest sharing of innermost feelings and OK he’d honestly shared his deepest feelings on the matter of them and the grinning hypocrites had shaken their fists and told him to screw… and but so in the meetings the poison would leap and spurt from him, and how but he found out all that these veteran White Flaggers would do as a Group when he like vocally wished them harm was nod furiously in empathetic Identification and shout with maddening cheer ‘Keep Coming!’ and one or two Flaggers with medium amounts of sober time would come up to him after the meeting and say how it was so good to hear him share and holy mackerel could they ever Identify with the deeply honest feelings he’d shared an...

Just about soaking my hanky here, I'm so choked up.

How do trite things get to be trite? Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti- interesting?

AA’s patient enforcer was always and everywhere Out There: it stood casually checking its cuticles in the astringent fluorescence of pharmacies that took forged Talwin scrips for a hefty surcharge, in the onionlight through paper shades in the furnished rooms of strung-out nurses who financed their own cages’ maintenance with stolen pharmaceutical samples, in the isopropyl reek of the storefront offices of stooped old chain-smoking MD’s whose scrip-pads were always out and who needed only to hear ‘pain’ and see cash. In the home of a snot-strangled Canadian VIP and the office of an implacable Revere A.D.A. whose wife has opted for dentures at thirty-five. AA’s disciplinarian looked damn good and smelled even better and dressed to impress and his blank black-on-yellow smile never faltered as he sincerely urged you to have a nice day. Just one more last nice day. Just one.

Uh-oh... A linchpin of a section that ties a couple of loose ends together, but also an emotive piece that stands alone well.

And that was the first night that cynical Gately willingly took the basic suggestion to get down on his big knees by his undersized spring-shot Ennet House bunk and Ask For Help from something he still didn’t believe in, ask for his own sick Spider-bit will to be taken from him and fumigated and squished.

<3 - A really downright touching little passage that still gets me every time.

(Erdedy just started his nine-month humility job at the Merit station down by North Harvard St. in Allston) for 32 minimum-wage hours a week. Or to have his leg be joggling like that all the time from tensions of Withdrawal: from fucking grass? But it’s not Gately’s place to say what’s bad enough to make somebody Come In and what isn’t, not for anybody else but himself, and the shapely but big-time-troubled new girl Kate Gompert—who mostly just stays in her bed in the new women’s 5-Woman room when she isn’t at meetings, and is on a Suicidality Contract with Pat, and isn’t getting the usual pressure to get a humility job, and gets to get some sort of scrip-meds out of the meds locker

There must be some kind of structural analysis to focus on here, some kind of a nexus for various minor characters introduced in the 1st 3rd of the text to be collected together...

legs crossed in maybe a bit of a faggy schoolboy way,

Oooofff, now, come on, now, don't say shit like that... >:(

He likes that Erdedy, sitting, looks right up at him and cocks his head slightly to let Gately know he’s got his full attention. Gately doesn’t know that this is a requisite for a white-collar job where you have to show you’re attending fully to clients who are paying major sums and get to expect an overt display of full attention. Gately is still not yet a good judge of anything about upscale people except where they tend to hide their valuables.

See, now, there's like layers to this whole subset of AA devotees, and one that picks up and requires close readings of nearly ever sentence in these AA sections.

One of the tricks to being of real service to newcomers is not to lecture or give advice but only talk about your own personal experience and what you were told and what you found out personally, and to do it in a casual but positive and encouraging way.

and for an instant the Provident cafeteria seems pin-drop silent, and his own heart grips him like an infant rattling the bars of its playpen, and he feels a greasy wave of an old and almost unfamiliar panic, and for a second it seems inevitable that at some point in his life he’s going to get high again and be back in the cage all over again, because for a second the blank white veil levelled at him seems a screen on which might well be projected a casual and impressive black and yellow smily-face, grinning, and he feels all the muscles in his own face loosen and descend kneeward; and the moment hangs there, distended,