DFW

I have fallen hard, again, for David Foster Wallace. In high school I was intrigued by Brief Interviews and Girl with the Curious and liked both but was never tempted to dip into the novels. In college I exploded through A Supposedly Fun Thing and have never doubted that it's one of the all-time great and wonderful works of creative non-fiction. And I've stumbled across some of the scattered essays from Consider the Lobster and elsewhere over the years.

But this summer I picked up again A.S.F.T. and the jolt of familiarity, recognition, intimacy was almost troublingly vivid. And so now I have started Infinite Jest and I have no qualms and my hands do not shake when I hold it and I do not sigh when I fit all of its thousand or so pages into my bag and I do not think it strange that I might need two bookmarks to proceed through the whole of it. Which I will do. Even if it's all I do this fall.

Because reading David Foster Wallace especially now this summer after so many years of not reading him and never reading his novels, it's like that person in your life, I think everyone has one and I may have several, that person who is there is no other way to say it just really the most brilliant person you know, who seems not to ever walk across a room but to be always propelled forward by the gust of an idea swelling their mind like a sail, but you've never really been so close because in spite of this brilliant mind there is also a lot of pain and it is very close to the underneath of their skin and you can see it there when the sun hits in a certain way, illuminating their veins like rail lines on a city map, and so maybe you see them, i mean really see them, only a few times a year. And when you do, you sit at a table and talk. They talk, mostly. You are so involved in what they're saying, your mind responds so eagerly, that it may be hours before you realize that you haven't actually spoken in hours, and then you forget again, and but then you think they are talking maybe a little too fast or maybe it's a little too loud and you do a mental check for which of your neighbors might be home and which of the ones who might be home might mind, and maybe you get up to double-lock the door or put on some music. And maybe when you come back you lean away a little at this point. Maybe you duck your head or stop making such furious eye contact. The force of what's being said is enough to shave a layer of shine off the table. For a moment you've lost the thread but when you have it again, it is brighter than before.

And then the sun comes up and you go to sleep.