A few days ago, I finished a book called Infinite Jest. It was written by a man named David Foster Wallace. He wrote some novels, essays, and short stories and then killed himself in 2008.
Infinite Jest is over 1,000 pages long and contains about a hundred pages of endnotes. It's not easy to read. I am about 1.5 notches below a legitimate speed reader, and it took me nearly two months to finish the book. I've started (and failed to finish) other obscenely large novels before - Anna Karenina, Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace are among the most notable. I love the old Russians but I just couldn't stick it out. Maybe because the characters' names all sound the same.
Three or four nights a week, I would read Infinite Jest for about an hour before falling asleep. At first, using this time for reading felt like a sacrifice. Previously, that time had been dedicated to a rare pleasure - TV watching. Usually The Simpsons or Arrested Development. Sometimes, if I was in a particularly egg-headed mood, I'd watch documentaries. Something about the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, or early 1990s American arcade games, or anything narrated by David Attenborough.
After watching the documentaries, I often felt like I learned something. How human beings can become insanely territorial and hyper-competitive about the most trivial of accomplishments - thank you, A Fistful of Quarters. How ignorance, pride and confusion can lead well-spoken intelligent people to make terrifically fatal mistakes - hats off to Fog of War. How magnificent birds of paradise attract mates. That one was from Planet Earth, I think.
But none of them ever made me think the way Infinite Jest did. The act of holding a thick, heavy chunk of paper in my hand and manually flipping individual pages made me feel like I was making some kind of active attempt to consume information. It was entertaining, to be sure - I don't have the masochism/self-discipline to read a thousand pages of mind-numbingly boring shit. Still, it didn't feel like plain entertainment (which is kind of funny because in many ways the book is about entertainment and its role in our lives). Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I felt my determination to consume and appreciate the book had some kind of tangible intellectual reward. Like the effort to devote my full attention to reading and understanding the words on the page lead to a real benefit.
In the foreword to The Best American Essays 2010, Robert Atwan discussed (whined about?) the downfall of active reading in the 21st century. He might have a point, however. Serious reading does seem to have taken a shot to the groin lately. I don't mean what we read - people have always like to read cheap and exciting crap, and they probably always will. It's more a matter of why and how we read.
Why - We read for the same reasons we watch movies or listen to albums. Not for entertainment, though that's a pretty decent cover. We read so that we can judge. So that we can present an opinion or interpretation or alternate viewpoint. To show that we have absorbed some largish piece of information and analyzed it in some intelligent fashion. We look at it from some kind of perspective (bonus points if it begins with neo and included a hyphen) and then formulate a judgment on it. The words can't just mean what they say - there must be something behind/under/around/between them. And in this way many vigorous and impassioned conversations are born.
How - When I was growing up, there was a semi-popular series of books called Choose Your Own Adventure. In these books, you'd read a page and then be presented with several "choices" - one decision would lead you to page 79, where you'd rescue the princess, and another would take you to pg. 101, where the Maori tribesmen feed you alive to a patch of carnivorous dandelions. It was a primitive way of giving the reader some active agency in the reading experience. Today we've become a bit more advanced - the Interwebs allows us to post comments before even finishing a story. We can offer chapter-by-chapter feedback using "social media" (a term I have grown to dislike even more than "....in this economy..."). Polls will ask our opinion, informed or not, and then convey our feedback to some mysterious entity that presumably uses the polls' results to make some decision, or not. Either way, we are active and involved in our reading. Empowered, if you will. Understanding the material isn't nearly as important as having a reaction to it.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, reaction. I think it would defy physics or something (biology? chemistry? I'm not a science person) if we didn't have a reaction to stimuli. But reaction should be accompanied by introspection. I don't know what the correct ratio is, but I do believe you should look inwards before you speak outwards. Or something like that. Infinite Jest made me think a whole hell of a lot. Here are some of the main culprits, in the form of quotes.
"Certain things not only can't be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that can be taught."
My fourth grade teacher once gave our class a creative writing assignment for Halloween. We were supposed to write a ghost story - I think a haunted house was to be involved in some way. I populated my story with thinly disguised characters based on my classmates. I say "thinly disguised" because I used their actual names and only changed some unimportant physical characteristics - for example, Bart Larson was twelve feet tall and covered in reptilian scales. The other kids loved the stories and from that point on I neglected multiplication tables and stuck strictly to the fourth-grade-horror-fiction-writing business. After seven or eight installments my grades had suffered enough to earn a semester-long ban from the old classroom Macintosh. I didn't write any more stories.
A few years later, my English teacher (who I greatly respected) held an essay title contest in our class. We would write around three essays per month. To be honest the students could give two shits about the actual content of our essays, but we were nuts about the title contest. I quickly figured out that the more bizarre and nonsensical my title was, the more my classmates loved it. It didn't matter if the title had any relation to the essay itself - the sheer weirdness of the words was beautiful enough. Becoming the undisputed heavyweight champion of the seventh grade essay titling world might not seem like a huge accomplishment, but I took some considerable pride in it. Then the rules were changed (the title had to pertain directly to the essay's content and omit profanity or scatological references or unflattering comments about peers' choice of underwear), I became righteously pissed off at the arbitrary censorship and promptly refused to write another good title again. Or maybe "was unable to" would be more accurate...
I wasn't taught to love writing. No teacher ever sat me down and said, "Hey, kid, you're kind of shitty at expressing your thoughts vocally. Maybe you'd be better at letting some of those thoughts out if you used a pen and paper instead. You might feel pretty relieved if you were writing things down on a consistent basis." I was never taught to think in strange ways because, by definition, if you can teach someone to imitate something then the thing you are teaching really isn't that strange.
But I was taught to be clear and coherent in my writing and by extension clear and coherent in my thinking/expressing of thoughts. Unfortunately real life isn't usually clear and coherent like that. It's usually weirdly twisted, often not in an unpleasant way. And you can either get comfortable with that idea, or spend many years with "Pissed Off" as your default setting. In my case, I am working on unlearning many of the lessons I absorbed at a young age.
Sometimes it's hard to believe that the sun's the same sun over all different parts of the planet.
Five or six times a week, I think about a person I love. I think about how quickly we shed our skins - how less than eleven months ago we awoke in the same city and were separated by something greater than space. I think about this person and am filled with a kind of quiet, hopeless, happily determined and accepting love and wonder what we would say if our new selves met again. If anything is the same except for my unconditional love, and if we are both still living on the same planet in the same universe.
We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young.
Being trapped in the self: the main reason I - started reading, developed an interested in dogs,enjoyed writing, pretended to like pro wrestling, played baseball, tried out for the school musical, quit the basketball team, ignored my sisters for around five years, had my first alcoholic drink, hated high school, tried to appreciate Pantera, went to church, scorned old friends, smoked pot, changed majors, transferred universities, hit rock bottom, entered therapy, joined a meditation center, came to Korea.
Notice that the positive things came only after a prolonged period of great desperation. There was nothing I could give to make the feeling of aloneness go away. Taking things didn't work either. None of the masks fit. Acceptance is the only thing that really worked, I think. And acceptance takes patience, perseverance, and a lack of other semi-viable options. So it's not for everyone.
"It was if his head perched on the bedpost all night now and in the terribly early A.M. when Hal's eyes opened snapped open immediately and said Glad You're UP I've Been Wanting to TALK To You and then didn't let up all day until he could finally try to fall unconscious, crawling into the rack wretched to await more bad dreams. ~(my emphasis)
The incessant mental chatter that is your constant companion in times of mega-huge sadness/stress. The reason I gave up caffeine in January 2010 - waking up so jittery and terrifyingly alert that my brain didn't need any assistance in reaching 100% (in)efficency. That awful feeling when even after a "good night's rest" the same crippling fear is waiting to greet you in the morning.
No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was unendurable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering.
The point of the Dhamma. Why living in the present moment is, in my opinion, the most effective path to happiness. Mark Nunberg's voice: "Oh, it's like this now. This is how it is. Can this be OK?" And finding out, more often than not, that it can be OK. That things only get unbearable when you start imagining that same fear/loneliness/depression/sadness/hatred stretching out into infinity. Most mature adults can deal with a disappointing moment - only a genuine goddamn saint can deal with a lifetime of shit.
David Foster Wallace received a MacArthur Fellowship award in 1997. Supposedly these awards go to people who "show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work." I'm not sure if this is always the case, but it does lend some credence to my feeling that David Foster Wallace was a genius.
At least thirteen or fourteen times during the book, I was forced to put it down and shake my head in confusion/admiration/awe/agreement/some combination of the previous. It certainly wasn't an easy read - flipping back and forth between main narrative and endnotes 388 times is a pain in the ass - but after getting about 100 pages in I felt a strange trust in Wallace. I knew he wasn't pulling this shit just to show how clever he was. There had to be some sort of reason, even if I couldn't sense it at the moment.
Luckily, there was. I think. Infinite Jest was unlike any book I have ever read or will hopefully read again. A work of modern genius that defies any real attempt to analyze it. Wallace hung himself three years ago - he won't be writing any more books. I feel somewhat like a music fan who fell in love with Kurt Cobain in 1997.
All we can do is enjoy what exists in this present moment.
