September 22nd, 2008
David Foster Wallace
I’ve never yet been able to get into DFW, although the problem is general: I’m rarely able to enjoy any American novelist my age or younger. Perhaps something to do with the fact that I’ve tried to be one myself.
But both he and his recent suicide certainly deserve notice. The world is poorer that he’s gone. And I intend to finish something he left behind.
I haven’t seen anything to indicate why he hung himself, aside from family reports of chronic depression. I recall that when Hunter Thompson checked out, in February 2005, he left behind a note indicating great distress that football season had ended.
bernthal says:
First he wrote, and then he killed himself.
About how bad it is, I think he said, “Look, I wasn’t kidding.”
But also this — “There is hope. You can always kill yourself. It doesn’t have to just go on and on, against your will.”
September 18th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
bernthal says:
To clarify, I’m not quoting Wallace, I’m suggesting what his suicide may have “said.”
September 18th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
ed says:
One of Nietzsche’s more well known mots: The thought of suicide is a comfort on many a cold night.
Gore Vidal noted in the 80s, when asked whom he thought the important writers of the day, that it was no longer possible for a writer to be important.
Camus, underground in France in 1942, reported:
“War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it.
“So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh.
“In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. ‘Art and nothing but art,’ said Nietzsche, ‘we have art in order not to die of the truth.’
People disagree as to how universal these mots may be. They seem to me highly contextual and contingent — with Nietzsche just sniffing the horrors of industrialism, Camus supplying confirmation beneath darkness at noon.
But, even so, the context has not improved much; the environmental downtrend is intact: the masters of the world are today preparing to “immortalize” their grandchildren with biotech.
Did it bother Wallace, I wonder, that he could never be important, as writers of modernity once were, in such a world?
One wonders how suicide rates will trend among the nascent immortals.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
ed says:
Here’s a big piece in the New Yorker. Worth reading.
March 6th, 2009 at 10:48 am