As you all probably know by now, David Foster Wallace died of depression last week. I’ve been musing about this ever since I saw the notice over the weekend, and it’s been very confusing and very sad.
At first I had trouble even comprehending the news, because it made no sense to me that someone with so vital and keen a voice, and so much evident talent for hyper-contextualizing his point of view, should choose to commit suicide — which some part of me has always thought to be a terribly selfish way to die. I’d never heard that he’d been depressed, or that he’d taken medical leave from his position at Pomona to deal with his depression, which had apparently stopped responding to his medications.
Reading his parents’ reactions in various obituary notices has been equal parts distressing (my mom-strings are all reverberating in sympathetic harmonies) and comforting (because they seem to understand why he did it and don’t blame him for not being able to cope with the disease any longer). It’s also been somewhat of a revelation, because I’m finally getting it that people whose depression drives them to commit suicide are actually succumbing to a disease the same way people who die of cancer or any other illness would. Rather than cut off your oxygen, depression cuts off your options, and renders life too painful to endure.
But I’m still in that bargaining stage of grief wherein I’m wondering what might have been done to prevent this from happening. I read Mimi Smartypants’ post on DFW last night before bed and followed her links to this story, which didn’t make me cry but did make me think; and then last night I had a very vivid wish-fulfillment dream: in it I found a wormhole (bizarrely, that I accessed by crawling out the old window of my parents’ third-floor landing, which no longer exists) to DFW’s childhood home, circa 1974, and I got to meet and befriend young David before he had any inkling that he’d grow up to be a writer, or famous, or a widely-regarded genius. In my dream, I was very conflicted about telling him that I knew who he was, or that he was destined for any of this tortured greatness — all I wanted was for him to keep in touch with me in the future somehow, and to let me know that he was ok. At one point I did tell him, I know who you are because in the future I come from you’re a very famous writer — but I also said, you know you shouldn’t think that that’s your only choice, now. You can still choose to be anything you want to be. There are always options. But in my head even though I was telling him this, I was wondering if by seeding his imagination with alternative futures I was basically un-writing Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing, etc., and is that the right thing to do? He has to work it out for himself, I kept telling myself. But at the same time it was just inexpressibly comforting to befriend this little kid with no idea about his destiny. I still don’t know exactly why.
I woke up feeling melancholy about it, though. Like all vivid dreams, it took several hours for the plausibility of it to wear off, and it wasn’t until mid-morning that I could think clearly enough to see that duh, a wormhole back to 1974 is totally impossible, and that I shouldn’t be thinking about trying to find one. Nevermind that the whole visit-from-the-future wouldn’t really help avert the end, either.
I have no trouble confessing that I actually hated Infinite Jest. I resisted reading it for ages out of principle, because I resented the idea that here was some guy who theoretically had defined the voice of my generation, and what did that mean, anyway? But after a friend had insisted to me that I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, I quickly saw that DFW was of course brilliant, and immediately decided to give IJ the benefit of the doubt, and launched right in. It took me I think about a week and a half to read it, and when I was finished I wanted to hunt him down and kill him. 1,400+/- pages, seven distinct storylines, and not a single damned thing is actually resolved at the end of the book. It’s suspenseful, and very rich — and I read it hungrily, the way one reads a good mystery story; but unlike a mystery, there was no denouement and no explanation for anything that had happened in the book, and no real clue as to the ultimate fate of any of the main characters. And I’d actually remained hopeful that there would be some revelation or explanation, up until the very, very end.
Maybe that’s the metaphor then for how I should think about DFW’s death, then.
But I keep coming back to this bit from ASFTINDA:
There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir — especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased — I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
And then this:
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable — if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.
It’s that last bit though – you do have to try to live with those choices and consequences. Don’t you?
I don’t know what else to say except that I’ll miss all the books DFW won’t write, and the world is rather bleaker for me without him in it, though I never met him. He was a “friend of the mind,” as only a great writer can be.