I'll admit it - I had never heard of David Foster Wallace and his magnum opus, Infinite Jest. I happened upon the MetaFilter article via popurls and thought it was about Dallas-Fort Worth.
But when I read the article and especially the comments, I was intrigued enough to click the link to his 2005 Kenyon commencement address, and I found that really moving. He summed up things that I would love to be able to relate in the writing that I do, and he did it colorfully and emotionally.
But it was long. So long. And that's the writer's dilemma, you see - put everything you have in your head to paper and who will read it? Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20 summarized the frustration that most readers have with profilgate authors: you want to read it, you know it will be interesting but you have to make time from all the water he refers to in the Kenyon speech to get to it.
And so it gets harder, because you're always asked to distill, to compact, to compress, and if that's not your process you just wind up making it shorter and shorter and then th gs disap ear f om t e m ss ge. And it's not what you want to say, and it's not what people who love you enough to post reviews on fanboy sites and boards want to read (and you love them, but they're not big enough of an audience to threaten a publisher with), and then they go back to your first novel and say "Why doesn't he write like that anymore?"
He doesn't write like that because it took him 25 or 30 or whatever years to write that first big one, and he isn't young and angst-ridden anymore, now he has love and experience and perspective and legacy and - it's just not the same. He's just not the same.
And so that active imagination, that always-on background buzz, the thing that gives you funny things to say at parties or little mind-movies when things are dull (as Steven King said in "The Body"), it turns bored, then ansty and finally angry and it starts chewing up the scenery and pitching bombs of visions of what you've done to contribute to screwing up the lives of those around you with your inability to summarize. And it starts to hurt. A lot.
If you're one kind of person you try to drown it out, with various pleasures-cum-addictions, or you walk away and go into reclusion, or you keep pounding it out, ten pages a day no matter what and let the page/sequel count advocate your creative worth in place of your muse.
But if you're a certain kind of person, a certain combination of insight and empathy and arrogance and self-abasement, you start to think you've squandered something, you've thrown away something that was important to you, something that was important about you, and now the sole purpose of your life is to be a bad example for others.
And certain options become open to you. Options that leave you hanging in a house on a cold September morning and reveal to all around you just how little you believed in yourself and how little you believed in whatever tepid messages of hope your work expressed. In how much you had to share with the world. But that's not really the truth; you didn't really want to die, you just wanted the pain to end. And so it did.
RIP, DFW. I hope that imagination is again your friend.
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