David Foster Wallace, 1962 - 2008
Last night, as I was grading my students’ reflections on their names, I noticed a new AP story link on the Times: David Foster Wallace had died. When I clicked on the link, I was anticipating suicide; I would have guessed that he died of a weak heart or of a drug overdose. Apparently, his wife found his body; he had hung himself.
Though I have never even considered picking up Wallace’s acclaimed, though bloated, novel Infinite Jest, I have read many of his essays and short stories. He was a prolific, prodigious writer with an uncommon acumen for language and an original voice fitting for a generation gorged on mass media. He was a trailblazer whose talent and irreverence carved a space for a new generation of writers that includes Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, and Jonathon Safran Foer. He could write adeptly and insightfully about subjects as diverse as tennis and demerol. Today, Michiko Kakutani of the Times wrote a marvelous paen to his achievements and ability.
Whenever I read of suicide, especially of the suicide of someone like Wallace who had the perseverance to achieve success in a fickle field, I cannot help but wonder why. Though I have suffered through serious bouts of depression in my life, I struggle to empathize with those who take their own lives. This inability to empathize is routed in my own irrational fear of death. As a child, I oft lay awake at night pondering the other side. Then, as the son of two occasionally Baptist parents, the infinite space of my presumed afterlife disturbed me; How could there be no end? Wouldn’t a journey of bliss with no end and no differentiation from one day–if time after was even demarcated into days–to the next inculcate feelings of loss and despair? Even then, the experiences of my short life adumbrated a vague notion of emotional relativism, that the satisfactions of life would be diluted without the miseries of disappointment, frustration and failure. Now, many years later and many beliefs lighter, the thought of my death can instill apoplexy if I linger with the concept. I simply cannot fathom the binary transformation away from existence; though our daily ritual of sleep certainly suggests a reasonable analogue, my minds clenches: how can one’s being simply cease? I now often wish I could return to the belief of an life after.
The only reasonable rationale for taking one’s life would be the allure of relief from an unbearable existence. What would make life unbearable? For many in the winter of their lives, who are near their natural end, being both physically constrained and mentally diminished, that life, especially relative to the lives they knew, would become insufferable is not as nearly incomprehensible to me. But never have I felt pain, either mental or physical, in my life that would allow me, even though extrapolation, to understand how someone in the spring, summer, or fall of their life could rationally bring their lives to a premature close. Perhaps I suffer from a deficit of imagination or perhaps my irrationally exuberant fear of death impairs my imaginative faculties. Or perhaps sucide cannot be the endsum of rational gestures. Nonetheless, that Wallace, a man whose facility for imagination was without peer, could not summon a image of tomorrow that would subdue his despair, overcome the temptation of self-immolation, and allow him to step down from the edge is a haunting, enervating image of disconnection.
