Candleblog

Emily just learned via Stephen Johnson’s Twitter feed that writer David Foster Wallace killed himself yesterday.  This is wretchedly sad news.  Here is the obituary in the LA Times.

Wallace was one of my favorite writers and someone with whom I felt a great affinity, even though his intellect and talent for writing so greatly dwarfed my own. He wrote about things that I care about and eloquently and acrobatically articulated what it is that I like about those things.

Wallace is best known for Infinite Jest, which I could never get through (perhaps it’s now time to revisit that behemoth), but I loved him most for his non fiction. During the US Open last week I mentioned his lengthy 2006 NYTimes essay on Roger Federer to several people. That essay is what made me interested in watching professional tennis again after many years away from the sport.  His collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, is a treasure in my library — the eponymous essay being the real gem in the collection.  But my favorite book of Wallace’s is one that few people — even Wallace afficionados — ever mention.  Everything and More: a Compact History of Infinity is a book about the history and nuance of transfinite math.  Wallace made me care about the nerdy intricacies of the various types of infinite numbers in exactly the same way he made me care about the nerdy intricacies of Roger Federer’s tennis game.  His way of observing and then articulating the minutia of these subjects is fantastically sharp and equally as infectious.  You become a math nerd just by reading this book, whether you want to or not.

I was just talking to Spine about this on the phone and he agreed that composing a blog post about something this awful is hard.  My feelings about it are bigger than a blog post.  I’ll stop tying now, and leave you with the following quote from a commencemnet address that Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005.  This is lifted from Gerry Canavan, who zeroed in on the quote when he learned of this tragic news.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

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And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.