This is the best essay I've read all week. Thank you so much for sharing it. His point about the great truths in life sounding like banal platitudes was dead on. It's the type of thing that's easy to say, but hard to convey. He did a great job of it. For instance, his point about seeming to be the center of the universe reminded me of Johnny Cash's great re-make song "Hurt" where he says "You are still out there. I am still right here." Totally banal and simplistic, but also very true and difficult to grasp. [video link] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go
Thank you for posting this. I'd not heard of David Foster Wallace, but having read this and watched an interview, I've ordered a copy of Infinite Jest. Sounds like he was a brilliant man. Thanks.
I'm a huge DFW fan. If I may make one recommendtion, do not start with Infinite Jest. It's a wonderful book, but it's not exactly a breezy read. It's totally doable, and it's not obscure, like, say, Joyce's Ulysses. But it is a long slog.
Instead, I recommend reading some if his short pieces first. It'll allow you to better appreciate Infinite Jest, and the short pieces are a little more immediately gratifying. My personal favorites are 'Good Old Neon' from gis short story collection, Oblivion, and 'A Supposedely Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' from an essay collection of the same name.
DFW's short stories are great. But I found one huge hole in Infinite Jest: It was completely lacking hope. I'll take a long slog of a read any day if I'm not just going to walk away depressed. Gulag Archipelago was worth the read because Solzhenitsyn kept reminding the reader there was hope in humanity. DFW, well, not so much.
In the Charlie Rose interview, DFW says he expected the critical reviews to consider the book to be sad, but instead he was surprised and disappointed that the book was lauded for its comedic aspects.
So, I think you were picking up on a very intentional, central theme: the absence of hope. It's not a hole so much as it is the entire point, if we're to believe what he says to Rose.
...and it seems tired to point out his depression, suicide, etc... but listen: Infinite Jest seems to be coming from a real place inside him, and maybe you gained some insight into depression by noticing the absence of hope. My understanding is that, for the affected, depression is every bit as much like a hole inside yourself, and a symptom of depression is lacking hope.
Jesus: the very thought of Infinite Jest as a 'cry for help.' Scary. Here is part 1 of the interview:
Thanks, but your comment is so hard to follow. I've heard that interview before, and just listened to the ten minute clip you linked. Nowhere did I hear the name Jesus. What is this "Jesus: ..." thing you've got up there, a quote? From whom? Also, the Rose interview was while he's alive, so what's with "...and it seems tired to point out his depression, suicide, etc..."? Who are you ellipsising?
Or, don't be afraid of IJ, but set your expectations properly; as a coherent narrative, it's only going to start coming together in the final third of the book. Until then, read it as a series of intimate essays written from a parallel dimension.
Don't skip the footnotes. They aren't intended to be optional.
Also note that the many factual errors in the footnotes appear to be honest mistakes by the author rather than an effort to signpost an unreliable narrator. I really tied my mind in pretzels before figuring that out.
This is the dumbest thing I've read on HN in a long time. It's dumb on so many levels (the nature of thought, the actual meaning and intent of the essay, how depression works, and the circumstances of Wallace's death) that it actually functions as a kind of marvel of dumbness.
If it wasn't concurrently and needlessly mean, I'd thank you for writing it. Instead, I'm just going to remember how dumb you appeared to be.
Much of what DFW believed about the world, about himself, about the nature of reality, ran counter to his own mental wellbeing and ultimately his own survival. Of the psychotherapies with proven efficacy, all seek to inculcate a mode of thinking in stark contrast to Wallace's.
In this piece and others, Wallace encourages a mindset that appears to me to actively induce alienation in the pursuit of deeper truth. I believe that to be deeply maladaptive. A large proportion of his words in this piece are spent describing that his instinctive reaction to the world around him is one of disgust and disdain.
Rather than seeking to transmute those feelings into more neutral or positive ones, he seeks to elevate himself above what he sees as his natural perspective. Rather than sit in his car and enjoy the coolness of his A/C or the feeling of the wheel against his skin or the patterns the sunlight makes on his dash, he abstracts, he retreats into his mind and an imagined world of possibilities. He describes engaging with other people, but it's inside his head, it's intellectualised and profoundly distant. Rather than seeing the person in the SUV in front as merely another human and seeking to accept them unconditionally, he seeks a fictionalised narrative that renders them palatable to him.
He may have had some sort of underlying chemical or structural problem that caused his depression, but we have no real evidence for that, we have no real evidence that such things exist. What we do know is that patterns of cognition that he advocated run contrary to the basic tenets of the treatment for depression with the best evidence base - CBT and it's variants.
Foster favoured a world view that was 'true' over one that made him happy. He saw happiness and contentment as essentially irrelevant compared to the pursuit of truth. I believe that to be his ultimate error.
I don't believe any of this is true. Read the middle essay in _Consider the Lobster_ about his engagement with his church in Normal, IL and hanging out with his neighbors watching the newscasts during 9/11. He's not a recluse withdrawn into his own head.
I think, based on the unfortunate tone you set with that first dumb comment, that you're drawing sophomoric extrapolations from a single essay that you are actually misreading.
I didn't say he was a recluse. I said that his way of dealing with the world was remote and intellectual, that he distanced himself from the world around him, that he habitually narrativised in preference to engaging. I believe that such a strategy, while indescribably useful for a writer, is a highly maladaptive strategy if you want to live happily in the world.
"The View from Mrs Thompson's" surely reinforces that argument. Several thousand words on his experience of one of the most shocking events in American history, but hardly one of them describes an actual emotion. It's practically an anthropological study. He lavishes endless verbiage to describe what kind of a place it is, what kind of people they are, but he doesn't even come close to writing about who they are, what they felt, what he felt, how they related to each other. From what he wrote, he may as well have witnessed it all through a one-way mirror.
Go, re-read it. Tell me that's a man who is living in the present. Tell me he isn't terrified of feeling something real.
I hate to defend the douchebag, but I'm afraid there is a germ of truth there.
DFW is perfect towards the end, when he talks about acceptance and awareness— the thesis ("This is water") is spot on. But the way he approaches it, as a question of choosing what to think, is fundamentally, tragically wrong.
To Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy folks call that focusing on cognition rather than experience. It's the classic fallacy of beginning meditators, who believe the secret lies in choosing what to think, or in fact choosing not to think at all. It makes rational sense as a way to approach suffering; "Thinking this way is causing me to suffer. I must change my thinking so that the suffering stops."
In fact, the fundamental tenet of mindfulness is that this is impossible. Not even the most enlightened guru on this planet can not think of an elephant. You cannot choose what to think, cannot choose what to feel, cannot choose not to suffer.
Actually, that is not completely true. You can, through training over a period of time, teach yourself to feel nothing at all. We have a special word to describe these people: depressed.
The "trick" to both Buddhist mindfulness and MBCT, and the cure for depression if such a thing exists, lies in accepting that we are as powerless over our thoughts and emotions as we are over our circumstances. My mind, the "master" DFW talks about, is part of the water. If I am angry that an SUV cut me off, I must experience anger. If I'm disgusted by the fat woman in front of me in the supermarket, I must experience disgust. When I am joyful, I must experience joy, and when I suffer, I must experience suffering. There is no other option but death or madness— the quiet madness that pervades most peoples' lives as they suffer day in and day out in their frantic quest to avoid suffering.
Experience. Awareness. Acceptance. Never thought— you can't be mindful by thinking about mindfulness, it's an oxymoron. You have to just feel it.
There's something indescribably heartbreaking in hearing him come so close to finding the cure, to miss it only by a hair, knowing what happens next.
[Full disclosure: My mother is a psychiatrist who dabbles in MBCT. It cured her depression, and mine.]
Wallace didn't die from a lack of mindfulness. Wallace succumbed to unexpected and fatal drug withdrawal syndrome, after he and his doctors attempted to get him off the medicine that had kept him alive for over a decade.
And what any of this has to do with this essay, I still don't know. I stand by my assessment of this thread as stupid and mean.
He died of complications resulting from depression. Call it what you want.
The GP was stupid and mean, and I'm not trying to dispute that. Shoot, I called him a douchebag.
But it remains true that mindfulness can help with depression, while this speech is about thinking about mindfulness, which sadly doesn't help with anything. Mindfulness is a practice, not a philosophy.
But you just proved the point I tried to make earlier. You refuted Wallace on the CONTENT of his speech, not on the fact that he eventually committed suicide.
I'm a longtime meditator and a big DFW fan. I generally agree with you. DFW is NOT spot-on.
