No this post is not about hell. It is a quote I found the hit home with the weight of a metal slugger. Especially the final line. But its a good hit. A cathartic one. The pain feels good because you know that someone else hurt enough to take the swing.
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise…. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 695-6
Wallace. An author who one day, while his wife left him alone, went to the garage, neatly arranged the pages of his last manuscript, wrote a two page note, and hung himself on the patio.
Some flames are too great for fire extinguishers. And when the flames are bigger than the fall, its time to jump.
12 comments
How’s the water?
Good quote (stroke a nerve), apparently the author was struggling with depression for almost 20 years and the meds he was on (who helped him continue writing) stopped being efective and he ended up commiting suicide as you say… got me curious, will try to read some of his writing.
another user here, not that long ago, posted a video of a speech given at a university by Wallace. My previous comment was a reference to that.
What the hell is water?
🙂
The speeches where you can SEE him….he sweats and clenches his teeth. I mean hard. The kind of clench that presses down hard enough it forces your lips to part. Always struggled talking to people.
I’m looking an interview right now and yes… he even admits to he interviewer that it’s hard to talk for him, but man, it is really interesting to see (the things he talks about, bot the sweat and clenching haha)
He is fascinating to listen to. And everything is “something I coukd talk abour for hours.” Infinite Jest had half a million words. Its 57 hours for the book and 8 hours for the footnotes on audiobook. He keeps talking because he feels he didnt get it right or didnt say enough or has another way to put it.
Never heard of the guy. Just watched one of the full interviews online. He has a lot of interesting stuff to say but also strikes me as kind of annoying. He comes across as always second guessing himself and trying to act timid, yet timid people don’t put out books of a million words or participate in 90 minute interviews. So he’s more talkative and apparently thinks he has more worth saying than he tries to come across.
There’s some truth in the quote that was posted but not sure I entirely agree with it. Jumping out of a burning building is escaping from an actual physical threat, likely to die anyway and deciding that a quick splat on the ground will hurt less than being consumed by fire. Choosing suicide is not the same, although I understand what he is trying to get at by talking about reaching a threshold of pain that you can no longer handle. But suicide when your life is in no actual danger is nothing compared to the choices you’d be forced to make in a burning building. Frankly after watching this full interview with him I almost feel like he would agree that suicide is a selfish pointless act especially when you’re a first world published author with a wife, so I think he would even question his own demise and the way he left this world.
Intelligent guy though, reminds me of myself that it seems like his head could probably burst into flames if he let himself sit around and think for too long. Non stop racing thoughts where your mouth can’t even keep up if you’re trying to explain yourself out loud. Maybe that’s why he had to write books, to get his thoughts out somehow. Would have been an interesting person to have a conversation with.
Spirit. He is speaking in a metaphor. He eloquently states that people who chose suicide dont choose death. They are choosing not to hurt anymore. His family saud that the last period of his life, he was terrified of practically everything.
Which brings me neatly to my next point. He flat out talks about his social anxiety. Its the real flavor. The kind that involves actual fear. He was always self conscious. Not timid. But worried about how he was perceieved. Worried about being judged and coming up short. Why? Because he so harshly judged himself. He could only assume the world did so too.
Yet when you speak out loud, when you present yourself to the public eye, they dont see your mind. Only what you show them. So he assumes you are as harsh a judge as him but dont have all the evidemce he does. So he talks. And talks. and talks. And writes. Desperately trying to catch up and fix the faults he sees each new word presents. Its like the story of the foreigners introducing lets say a slime slug to an ecosystem. Well all the slime trails are causing all the monkeys to slip and die or something so to fix it, they bring in a bunch of french people to eat the snails. But then the french people piss off the natives and start a war etc etc.
Wallace was a perfectionist you see. And anytime you give reality to something you have to sacrifice wgat you imagine it should be to the limitations of what it can be. So, in its extreme form, perfectionism paralyzes you into doing nothing. Or, when tempered with medication and treatment, it can be lessened to ‘only’ forcing you to talk and second guess every word. I would not say ‘timid.’ He just feels the weight his own and everyone elses judgement on every. single. thing. he does.
He isnt perfect. But I have nothing but respect for what he was. A brilliant mind that could not would not stop working.
@KF Look here http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/23_free_essays_stories_by_david_foster_wallace_available_on_the_web.html.
Might I suggest Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise ship. Be warned. He rambles. But its immensely entertaining if you let it be. He analyzes life…then analyzes his analysis….then analyzes word choice…always thinking and thinking about that thinking. And in this essay he shows that not only does luxury not guarantee happiness but it can be repulsive even to one getting to enjoy it.
I felt like i got a pretty good indication of who he was, just by watching the video of that speech. Then again, i have a “knack” for seeing-into people.
I agree that he did seem quite eccentric, and some of the angles he took, in describing “the water,” were not quite aligned with how i see things… but i realize that he was doing something i often do, and using the “most people” perspective, trying to relate his own experiences and observations to the rest of the world, but then also trying to refine his wisdom into something his audience could understand… which was the whole point of speaking to them. He wanted them to understand something tangential and abstract, and did his best to formulate his ideas about it, in a way he felt others could grasp, or at least relate to. I can’t hold it against someone like the person i observed in that video, that he was eccentric, and could possibly be seen as a self-important intellectual elitist… because he was also trying to overcome those aspects, rather than emphasizing them as if they were the whole point. People have a tendency to be annoyed by anyone who claims to know something they don’t, or understand something well-enough to have a different perspective, or insinuate that their audience hasn’t understood something important, just yet.
So, while i could understand someone (many, even) forming a less than appealing opinion of the guy, i disagree; except that he was certainly eccentric and intellectual, but i don’t see that as a problem, and i don’t think anyone else should either.
Also, i think it’s a bit disingenuous to suggest that the typical pains of life, especially those of a tormented but brilliant mind, are in no way similar to a burning building. When you have to live with the type of mind i have, it is indeed quite similar to a real physical threat, because i have to actually live it and experience it on a daily basis… “day in, day out,” all the time, and it never goes away. This indeed has real physical implications, and over a long period of time, can be justifiably compared to “burning alive,” though at a much slower rate, and more internally than externally. Internal suffering is just as “real” as external suffering; internal suffering even causes physical suffering. So of course it’s still real, and still a valid comparison, even if the conditions seem quite different.