David Foster Wallace: This is Water. This is Water.

I look up to David Foster Wallace.

I guess that’s the most germane thing to start with. In the interest of full disclosure, let me say the following: I found out about his work fairly recently (about a half decade ago) and haven’t even finished his most famous effort, Infinite Jest. I have made a point to read it slowly, taking a few pages in a week and leaving the book unread for days or weeks at a time. A friend whose opinion I greatly respect told me how beyond-hyperbole good it was and so after finding that out for myself within a hundred pages I decided that blowing through this work would be like putting a $300 meal in a blender to consume it faster and have since made the effort to savor the writing.

It’s immeasurably sad that now I will have to read it even more deliberately.

DFW has influenced me tremendously with his writings, almost sometimes to the point of parody. Writing since discovering him has changed for me, my natural tendency to digress and interlude has taken gigantic strides from the conciseness I once sought. Hyper aware and intelligent become description, DFW laced his essays with rebuttals addressing points I’m sure 99 percent of the populace wouldn’t even conjure individually unprompted, it was like bearing witness to a tennis player so good he could return his own serve better than another opponent (DFW is the reason I now follow tennis, now root for Federer, now care about a sport I literally was barely aware of before Federer as Religious Experience was published in the NY Times. How many other writers have had such an effect on me, on you? To give you interest that becomes sustained in something you never cared about before?) ever could. It was, and is, overwhelming at times to read him and to see evidenced in print the astounding mind working out the things we tend to see past. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is perhaps the funniest of his collected works and his titular essay about his experience on a cruise ship the best within its covers. Reading DFW observe how the notes of a cruise ship’s toilet tonally match classical music is to wish we could send him to perform every monotonous, soul draining experience we’ve ever had and then find how he uncovers the beauty and forgotten from them: to give affirmation to the process of living. I have never been so aware of the multitude of moments then after reading anything by DFW. I am continually inspired by him.

Good Old Neon is a short story concerned with a fraudulent man committing suicide, and it is, for my money, the most effective effort on internal thought and the interworking of an individuals’ mind that I’ve ever seen. It will be hard to read it in the wake of his death, especially because he caused it. It is worth the struggle, though. Here we find DFW putting words to the experience of trying to put words to his thoughts. The protagonist, whose life has been a series of lies to others in order to manipulate them to view him a certain way, is confronting the awfulness of his being and his intelligence while expressing the futility of trying to express anything to another. It closes after a beautiful bit of prose wherein DFW elucidates what the final moments of life will, he thinks, be.

Here I feel a shared burden with that protagonist; I cannot put here into words how DFW has changed me, has helped me, has inspired me and has challenged me. It would be enormously selfish and presumptuous of me to use his suicide to put into prose what I feel about him, but I’ll try anyway

A.D. Nuttall wrote of Shakespeare that “the best thinkers in the world have to run to keep up with him,” and that would certainly apply to DFW. Every time I’m presented with a new bit of writing from him I’m humbled and elated – to see how his great mind worked out the bits of simple interaction we’re all concerned with (as in his Kenyon Commencement Address) is to be presented with a philosophy more pertinent and real and simple and true than any found in the Philosophy section of Congress’ Library. To read his dissection of the Language Wars in Consider the Lobster is to be made staggeringly aware of your own ignorance and the breath of his knowledge while immediately becoming imbued with a sense of intellectual curiosity. DFW had the rare gift of presenting his interests in a way that made you interested in them, of working out his internal movement that gave us a voice to explain our own.

A few weeks ago, impatient, a friend and I were discussing when DFW might put forth a new book. His latest collection of short stories was released several years ago and had things he wrote decades ago. DFW is very deliberate with his work, parsing his essays and books and is selective about what he publishes. A single experience with a supervisor in A Supposedly Fun Thing… caused him to write an entire mead notebook with the various intellectual and emotional ramifications of carrying his luggage unaided to his quarters: This was a man who thought prodigiously and prolifically, but was also incredibly, astoundingly self aware and critical. It was selfish of us to want a new book from DFW, to thrust upon him our demands for his mind’s thoughts, but I’ll remain that way henceforth.

The great authors give us their visions, their stories, their characters. We walk into their worlds and we see what they see. DFW was a transcendent talent whose epic book is amongst the greatest ever written, but he did more with his essays and short stories, with his oeuvre: He showed us how our lives are and in so doing helps us live – truly, completely live.

Our Ethos

My heart beats with unconditional love/

but beware all the blackness that it’s capable of…

Cee-Lo Green