Oblivion: Stories

by David Foster Wallace

smallness within a grinding professional machine you can’t believe you once had the temerity to think you could help change or make a difference or ever be more than a tiny faceless cog in, the shame of being so hungry to make some sort of real impact on an industry that you’d fantasized over and over about finally deciding that making a dark difference with a hypo and eight cc’s of castor bean distillate was better, was somehow more true to your own inner centrality and importance, than being nothing but a faceless cog and doing a job that untold thousands of other bright young men and women could do at least as well as you, or rather now even better than you because at least the younger among them still believed deep inside that they were made for something larger and more central and relevant than shepherding preoccupied men through an abstracted sham-caucus and yet at the same time still believed that they could (= the bright young men could) begin to manifest their larger potential for impact and effectiveness by being the very best darn Targeted Focus Group facilitator that Team Δy and R.S.B. had ever seen, better than the nested-test data they’d seen so far had shown might even be possible, establishing via manifest candor and integrity and a smooth informal rhetoric that let their own very special qualities manifest themselves and shine forth such a level of connection and intimacy with a Focus Group that the TFG’s men or women felt, within the special high-voltage...