A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

by David Foster Wallace

I find myself, in my comfortable navy-blue seat, going farther and farther away inside my head, sort of Creatively Visualizing a kind of epiphanic Frank Conroy-type moment of my own, pulling mentally back, seeing the hypnotist and subjects and audience and Celebrity Show Lounge and deck and then whole motorized vessel itself with the eyes of someone not aboard, visualizing the m.v. Nadir at night, right at this moment, steaming north at 21.4 knots, with a strong warm west wind pulling the moon backwards through a skein of clouds, hearing muffled laughter and music and Papas’ throb and the hiss of receding wake and seeing, from the perspective of this nighttime sea, the good old Nadir complexly aglow, angelically white, lit up from within, festive, imperial, palatial… yes, this: like a palace: it would look like a kind of floating palace, majestic and terrible, to any poor soul out here on the ocean at night, alone in a dinghy, or not even in a dinghy but simply and terribly floating, a man overboard, treading water, out of sight of all land. This deep and creative visual trance—N. Ellery’s true and accidental gift to me—lasted all through the next day and night, which period I spent entirely in Cabin 1009, in bed, mostly looking out the spotless porthole, with trays and various rinds all around me, feeling maybe a little bit glassy-eyed but mostly good—good to be on the Nadir and good soon to be off, good that I had survived (in a way) being pampered to death (in a way)—an...