David Foster Wallace is dead.
As you know, he died a week ago. It’s been a long, gray week here. Nothing has gone well, some things have gone badly. A man considered one of the greatest writers of our time hung himself. I’ve never read him and a great light has gone out of the world, leaving ash where once there’d been a furnace with innumerable pipes, drawing out the hot air of wisdom and truth and putting back in the cooler air of fandom and admiration and awe. In all the air floated affection and caring. I’ve been reading McSweeney’s postings by readers and others about Foster Wallace and it’s brought me nearly or completely to tears at every turn. In reading Wil Lobko’s entry I found myself simultaneously laughing and crying and wholly unsure which was the foremost in me. This is the kind of thing that seems only to happen when you’re observing the emotions of others not when you mind in seated just above the hands you press to your face and you shake a little, unsure if it is joy or sorrow but a little in awe that a man, now dead, and those who loved him could invoke in me such a perfect balance between the two.
I bought a hardcover copy of Oblivion, some of his stories at work today. I’m making an exception in this special case for my only one book a month rule.
I just can’t quite figure out to do in a world where someone so monumentally talented, so successful could decide it wasn’t worth doing anymore. I had a friend from high school who also committed suicide, but that like so many other suicides I could hear about have the great weight of the tragedy there (and suicides for me may be perhaps one of the greatest tragedies, because they’re so very much preventable, you could just have not done it, have continued, had you just had an iota of strength to bring you back from that brink.) because I could understand somehow, I could look at the situation and extrapolate how tat situation had so mercilessly whittled down the options you saw as tenable, the things you could live with until there was just, nothing.
Here though, we have Wallace, a man who seems to have loved being genuine and good and truthful and who we all have to live without. A world where good, truthful and talented people cannot stand to live is not a comforting one.
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