Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

by David Lipsky

What they decided—David proposed it—was that the point of books was to combat loneliness.

They were really ’60s parents, and I don’t think—there was if anything a conscious attempt to not give overt direction. Although of course you end up becoming yourself.

I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It’s a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn’t require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can’t see me. And, and, they’re there for me, and I can, I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive.

[Why he prefers crazy women; and feels he’s ended up with lots of crazy ones …] Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.

DeLillo said, “That if serious reading disappears in this country, it will mean that whatever—it will mean that whatever we mean by the term identity has ceased to exist.”

That it’s just, that it’s real easy. And I think I’ve, my whole life, had a real penchant for avoiding the hard and doin’ the easy. And then part of, you know, part of why we’re here is to kinda learn how to not do that so much. That it’s

ultimately less painful not to do that.

The thing that really scares me about this country—and again, I’d want you to stress, I’m a private citizen, I am not a pundit. Is I think we’re really setting ourselves up for repression and fascism. I think our hunger, our hunger to have somebody else tell us what to do—or for some sort of certainty, or something to steer by—

I think this generation has it worse or better than any other. Because I think we’re going to have to make it up. I think we’re going to have to make up a lot of our own morality, and a lot of our own values.

And we’re the first generation—maybe people starting about my age, it started in ’62. We grew up sorta in the rubble of kind of the old system. And we know we don’t want to go back to that. But the sort of—this confusion of permissions, or this idea that pleasure and comfort are the, are really the ultimate goal and meaning of life. I think we’re starting to see a generation die … on the toxicity of that idea.

I’m talking about the number of privileged, highly intelligent, motivated career-track people that I know, from my high school or college, who are, if you look into their eyes, empty and miserable. You know? And who don’t believe in politics, and don’t believe in religion. And believe that civic movements or political activism are either a farce or some way to get power for the people who are in control of it. Or who just … who don’t believe in anything. Who know fantastic reasons not to believe in stuff, and are terrific ironists and pokers of holes.

don’t think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

mean most of our thoughts aren’t all that interesting. They’re mostly just confused. That stuff’s rhetorically real interesting ’cause it’s about how to be honest with a motive, you know?

And so that, clearly, I mean if you’re not stupid, you figure out that the real problem is the discontented self. That all this stuff that you think will work for a second, but then all it does is set up a hunger for more and better.

(Bible-epic voice) “They ate. And it was good. It was good.” Sit. Sit. [Re MacDonald’s] It’s bad, but in a really good way.

Like I said, the goal was really weird. The goal was to have something that was really pretty hard, but also to sort of be good enough, and fun enough, to make you be willing to do that. And in the course of that, teach you that you were … more willing than you thought you were?

I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it’s really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid.

Well for me, as an American male, the face I’d put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing’s enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough. That there’s a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuageable by outside stuff.