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.

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.”