David Foster Wallace RIP

I never met David Foster Wallace, and I won't presume to say that I felt that I knew the man through his writing, but he sure seemed to know me. The wry observations of life and the people that live it in the late '90s and early '00s, their foibles and petty triumphs, all were immediately recognizable in both myself and in the people around me. Wallace's gift was that he was able to pick out the minutiae in people's mannerisms and extrapolate them to a larger, more common condition that we all, knowingly and unknowingly, labor under. I'm thinking here of his discussion of being a tourist in his essay "Consider the Lobster," or what it was like to feel slightly alienated from people feeling much stronger emotions than myself on 9/11 in "The View From Mrs. Thompson's."

I was very taken with the controlled rage he displayed in "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart." The piece starts as a dissection of the sports memoir, but then moves into what it means to be able to verbally articulate one's talent. The sense of disgust with the genre is palpable throughout the essay, but the conclusion he reaches, that the very inability to intellectualize about one's talent is the very essence of that talent, opened a whole new method of thinking for me. As did his commencement speech at Kenyon College, which, for me, boiled down to a simple plea for people to treat each other as people and not be so quick to judge based on our preconceptions of them.

David Foster Wallace tempered his cynicism and his irony with a sincere humanity that is largely lost in popular fiction. That's what I related to when I read his words, and what I admired most. The courage that it takes to stand up and say "I don't like this aspect of how our culture has progressed, and I don't know what to do about it, but maybe acknowledging that this exists in myself may somehow make it better or easier for all of us." I will truly miss that.