Oblivion: Stories

by David Foster Wallace

when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade later, Schmidt experiences a kind of full-frame internal wince, that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once,

Or maybe that even the mere possibility of expressing any of this childish heartbreak to someone else seemed impossible except in the context of the mystery of true marriage, meaning not just a ceremony and financial merger but a true communion of souls, and Schmidt now lately felt he was coming to understand why the Church all through his childhood catechism and pre-Con referred to it as the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, for it seemed every bit as miraculous and transrational and remote from the possibilities of actual lived life as the crucifixion and resurrection and transubstantiation did, which is to say it appeared not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as a kind of navigational star, as in in the sky, something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful in the sort of distant way that reminded you always of how ordinary and unbeautiful and incapable of miracles you your own self were,

For it is true that the most vivid and enduring occurrences in our lives are often those that occur at the periphery of our awareness.

And yet much the same thing happens in adult life—as we age, many people notice a shift in the objects of their memories. We often can remember the details and subjective associations far more vividly than the event itself.

If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child.

The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside—you were a fraud.

It’s horrible to be regarded as a fraud or to believe that people think you’re a fraud or liar. It’s possibly one of the worst feelings in the world.

This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the

contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections,

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

the whole my whole life flashed before me phenomenon at the end is more like being a whitecap on the surface of the ocean, meaning that it’s only at the moment you subside and start sliding back in that you’re really even aware there’s an ocean at all. When you’re up and out there as a whitecap you might talk and act as if you know you’re just a whitecap on the ocean, but deep down you don’t think there’s really an ocean at all. It’s almost impossible to.

The fact is that we’re all lonely, of course.

corollary to the fraudulence paradox is that you simultaneously want to fool everyone you meet and yet also somehow always hope that you’ll come across someone who is your match or equal and can’t be fooled.

You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will,

One is, in fact, hard pressed to regard it as coincidental that all of these blossoming girls and daughters were, almost without exception, all dispatched to ‘out-of-State’ colleges, as with each passing year the mere physical sight of them became for their mothers a living rebuke.

Indiana storms surprise no one. You can see them coming from half a state away, like a train on a very straight track, even as you stand in the sun and try to breathe.

The conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance. Atwater knew—as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud—that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture.