Missing David Foster Wallace

Photo: Giovanni Giovannetti

In the summer of 2000, I listened to David Foster Wallace speak at a Lannan Foundation reading. At that time, he was living in Santa Fe as a Lannan writer-in-residence. Despite being only passingly familiar with his work, I felt drawn to go see the scruffy renegade in the publicity shot. In the near past, he’d published several short story collections and his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, which had impressed me in heft alone, though I’d not yet cracked it.

Trading glances with the floor, Dave schlepped to the stage and began speaking in his usual self-effacing, tic-forward, verbally aerobic style. The audience fell into his hammer grip almost immediately. I loved the whole look, the casually muscular, tennis-playing academic; the bandana; the gold-rims: the sturdy, visceral presence. Something in the contrast between the hulking frame and the gentle self-effacement was unexpected and wonderful. He seemed both genial and trustworthy. If this "regular guy" persona was a device, it was working, and of course he was smart enough to deliberately employ it. But I suspect that it came more from a genuine place inside him that both realized how unusual his gifts were and fathomed that this could be a barrier in relating to others. He not only seemed to want people to like him, but also to genuinely connect, despite the stature conferred by size, intelligence, academic degrees, writing ability, and literary celebrity. And like a big, shaggy St. Bernard who jumps in your lap, he didn’t seem to completely realize his own mass in those respects.

Since that lecture, I’ve read a lot of his work and greatly enjoyed David Lipsky’s book-length interview, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, published a few years back. I tend to pick up Wallace when I’m feeling lonely. When I can’t seem to connect with the world and its humans. When I’m cursing the Great Dumbing Down of America and living in places where critical thinking and intellectual discussions seem few and far between. I pull out an essay and watch Wallace’s microprocessor start whizzing away on any given topic, witness that intense consciousness, the brain on which truly nothing is lost, and start to feel better. If life on Earth can include a David Foster Wallace, then maybe we’re not quite as fucked as we appear to be. Reading Dave is like apprehending a transcript of human consciousness, all those fragments of thoughts, ideas, criticisms, internal dialogs that most of us bother to repress so as not to get locked up. Dave lets loose on the page full-blast, a faucet without a shutoff valve. 

When I first heard about Dave’s death I internally enacted what’s known in Expressionist circles as “schreien”—to shout, to scream, to cry, to yell, basically to howl, much in the manner of Edvard Munch. I was living in a small town in rural southern Oregon. Despite its few pockets of cultural aliveness, I nevertheless realized that there was no proximate human with whom I could share my despair. I didn’t dare even ask, for fear of the blank looks or vapid comments that would reveal utter lack of recognition for the man and his oeuvre. “David who?” would surely hit like a blade to the gut. Forgive me for wanting to live on the planet where everyone has read and can cogently discuss him.

I hoped it was a hoax, a publicity stunt, something The Onion had cooked up in the manner of his reputed 67-page footnoted breakup letter to his girlfriend.1 Surely just another postmodern manifestation of angst taken to a slight extreme. It couldn't be that we had this guy for only 46 years, only 3 novels, only 3 short story collections. Couldn't be that the Yosemite waterfall of verbiage was now, permanently, depleted.

Photo: Suzy Allman

Dave would have turned 50 today, and I'm pushing it, hard. We share the same cultural points of reference. Here was someone who had experienced the same music, art, books, film, TV, and vagaries of civilization, and could examine, deconstruct and criticize them in ways that launched an avalanche of thought. An American, who was all-too-familiar with the crassness and noise of our culture. Someone who admitted he watched too much TV but could simultaneously observe the behavior and realize where it was taking us, personally and as a culture. Wallace understood that for our generation and its successors, the seduction of the many screens was a force to reckon with. And it felt important enough to him to spend 1,079 pages delineating the landscape.

When I read Wallace, I felt a little saner. I looked to him as a kind of North Star. If Dave could endure this tedious, life-strangling universe, couldn’t I? Despite all of the world's problems, and his own tendency toward depression, he remained engaged, in the world, curious--not bitter and jaded and dulled. I’d imagine him my co-conspirator, the smirking best friend sitting with me on the park bench in Washington Square Park telling me to look over there! Then whispering in my ear an 800-SAT-scoring verbal aside of what the two guys in the cowboy hats were doing with the teenage girls from Bayonne. Right down to the frizzy perms and bad accents. And me unable to stop laughing until he did it again, 10 seconds later, with the Brooklyn alta kocker playing chess with the ballistic Armenian. How many times in a lifetime do we find a “friend” like this--someone so tapped in that reality comes through on 200 HD channels every moment at full volume and in 15 languages, all of which they speak, read, and write fluently? 

Ironically, Dave could often lift my own depression, precisely because I felt a kindred spirit actually did exist, in a world where I’ve experienced that feeling extremely rarely. In the words of Infinite Jest editor Michael Pietsch, "It is one of the great miracles of life, our ability to apprehend a human spirit through the sequences of words they leave behind."2 We both seemed to be coming at life from a depression-etched sensibility, the cognitive function moving continuously forward while an emotional spirit chastened by so much, so often, signaled to pull over and stop at the side of the road. Inside his writing, beneath all the bubbles of nervous energy and compulsion, I felt the despairing guy, scribbling for his life, like a Cuban salsa dancer dancing frantically for salvation. Beneath all the mania was someone waiting for the ultimate existential reassurance: you exist. There’s a place for you in the world you were born into.

While it’s been said that readers read to stave off loneliness, sometimes I think writers write for similar reasons: to be heard, and in the process, to be reassured that others understand and maybe even agree with your perceptions. To realize that you’re articulating thoughts that others have as well. Wallace left thousands of pages about modern life, thousands of ways for us to potentially connect, to see through the world’s illusions and get down to fundamental truths… It’s hard to realize that those thousands of hands extended toward the world didn’t seem to get met with enough of what he needed to continue to go on. Fucking depression, the great isolator.

I just reread the commencement address Dave offered at Kenyon College in 2005 (published as This is Water). It’s a wonderful piece that seems to boil down to some simple Buddhist concepts: mindfulness and compassion. And a testament to the basic goodness and generosity of spirit that drew people to him. Here he speaks a lot about the default settings we walk around with, the lens of self we bring to the world and how difficult that can be to transcend. A quote:

“…the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom.”3 

1 http://www.theonion.com/articles/girlfriend-stops-reading-david-foster-wallace-brea,76

2 Michael Pietsch, "Editing Infinite Jest," http://infinitesummer.org/archives/569

3 "David Foster Wallace, In His Own Words," http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words

For a sweet remembrance of Dave by four people who actually did know him, see http://podcast.lannan.org/2011/03/26/everything-and-more-a-tribute-to-david-foster-wallace-conversation-16-march-2011-video/.

A Prescient Quote from "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace"

David Foster Wallace, discussing his book Infinite Jest and the addictive qualities of TV and the Internet:

"The technology's gonna get better and better at doing what it does, which is seduce us into being incredibly dependent on it, so that advertisers can be more confident that we will watch their advertisements. And as a technology system, it's amoral.

It doesn't...have a responsibility to care about us one whit more than it does: It's got a job to do. The moral job is ours. You know, Why am I watching five hours a day of this? I mean, why am I getting 75 percent of my calories from candy? I mean, that's something that a little tiny child would do, and that would be all right. But we're postpubescent, right? Somewhere along the line, we're supposed to have grown up...

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 they're there for me, and 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.


The problem is it's also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know, I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up.

...as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up...at a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable to be alone with images on a screeen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're gonna die."


It's difficult not to agree with DFW. While distraction in measured doses can be a beautiful thing, the cumulative presence of TV, Internet, gaming, cell phones, texting, IMing, smart phones, social media, and sundry other technologies has undeniably altered the ways in which we relate to other humans. I have lately acutely observed the flattened, sometimes surreal quality of relating online versus the depth of experience one feels in 3-D (aka “real” life).

Online communication adds a layer of abstraction that seems to confound my brain. There is the person to whom one is speaking, then there becomes this avatar, the recipient of the email, who, while resembling this person, is solely a cognitive/verbal entity. The physical field is completely wiped out, and the emotional field clouded. Online relating brings with it much space for interpretation, in a way that face-to-face encounters often do not. In person, we read people’s energy more quickly than we do their words, and in fact process what they say via how they look and how they say it. Actual verbal content has been proven to be just a small component in the communication process. How things are said—vocal intonation, gesture, pitch, volume, phrasing—holds much more sway. All of this is absent in virtual communication.

Email and the Internet have also impacted the length of our relationships to others. Virtual communication makes it very easy to jump ship—to move on to the next person, the next topic, to blow people off, to not spend a lot of time working through issues. There are simply too many other options, and we lose patience quickly. Like a baby averts its eyes from anything that disturbs it, we can easily perform a few mouse clicks and the offensive entity has been excised. And if I can’t see you, see the upset you may feel when I dismiss you, then it doesn’t exist, right?

So if we in our world allow ourselves to be passively entertained, and accept a dehumanizing medium as our predominant form of communication, over time, what is the end result? While Foster Wallace’s conclusion feels somewhat extreme at this moment in time, it's certainly not inconceivable.

“ …each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. For us, it’s gonna be that at…a certain point…we’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being? And if we don’t do that then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt. Because we’re gonna get so interested in entertainment that we’re not gonna want to do the work that generates the income that buys the products that pays for the advertising that disseminates the entertainment. It just seems to be like it’s gonna be this very cool thing. Where the country could very well shut down and die, and it won’t be anybody else doin’ it to us, we will have done it to ourselves.”
























I highly recommend all of David Lipsky's fascinating book, which documents a 5-day road trip taken by the Rolling Stone correspondent and David Foster Wallace in 1996. It's both a compelling conversation and a glimpse into the writer's thought processes, interspersed with plenty of humor, humanity and bits of profundity. We're fortunate to have this transcript as a glimpse into Wallace's amazing mind.