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“It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know”
09.12.09 | 30 Comments
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« John Moe: I Did Not Read Infinite Jest This Summer
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Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages1 ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.1. Plus endnotesa.
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- Peer on Acknowledgements: Thanks for the link. I will check it out. I was just hoping for some announcements here...
- Prolixian on Acknowledgements: Peer – if you are interested in 2666, check out bolanobolano.com. A group read...
- Peer on Acknowledgements: When will we start the new book?
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- Scott on Join the Tunnel Club: If not here, maybe as a group read on the Bolano Googl Group. See the discussion of...
- ariel on Join the Tunnel Club: hi! can we please revisit this? is there going to be a 2666 club in january?
- sarah klise on Maria Bustillos: The Wonder of Wallace-L: Ken- No immediate plans for repub. We shall see what the...
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whoops, should explain: http://faq.metafilter.com/#4
Is this DFW? Should I know that already?
Missed and Loved, Loved, Loved.
What can be “weird” about missing someone who has taken us on so many journeys into his soul in his fiction and into the world outside through his essays? He is a companion and partner in an ongoing dialogue. When John Krasinski and I were making the film of “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” it seemed as if every day of the shoot that the actors playing the interviewees were some embodiment of DFW– that a part of him was on the set with us. I have never had this feeling before about any “adaptation” of a book to film that I have photographed. I can’t begin to explain it as there’s no precedent but it is almost visceral to me. He touches some core place in our psyche that goes beyond literature and into life. That extraordinary photo of him by Steve Liss, DFW sitting in a big chair next to a shadeless lamp, has a degree of presence that seems as if he is next to us, a beer just off-frame, waiting for the US Open finals to start.
I was thinking of him this morning. Couldn’t sleep last night. Got up at 2 and read some of IJ. I found some of my own thoughts there – stuff that I haven’t spoken aloud but that has looped through my brain. That’s been such a signature experience of reading Infinite Jest: the writing makes me pay better attention to my own life, to the massive everything inside and outside.
He thought so many thoughts, this man. And he it down. All of it. Turn the clock back a year and two weeks…
Thank you, David.
Grazie per tutto ciò che mi hai dato e continui a darmi…le tue parole, i tuoi pensieri, la tua anima, il tuo sorriso gentile.
Thank you for everything you gave (give) me…your words, your thoughts, your soul, your gentle smile.
Though I never met you, I love you.
(And thanks to everyone for this Infinite Summer)
Liana (Italy)
This title is probably the best way to say how I feel today….and of course DFW said it first.
Thank you (so many thoughts and reasons are just gonna have be summed up in those two words).
And yes, that subject line says it all.
So it goes.
Still no adequate words. A year later and I still can’t articulate the loss. It’s not really weird, as Bailey mentions above, because Wallace’s words enter us and take us places and grow synapses and chart new tributaries in our minds. And that map still lives in my head even though he eliminated his own. And knowing he was here was no big deal until hearing he wasn’t here anymore. And that stung deep in my brain where he had struck chords I didn’t know anyone would find. Still stings. I hope his family has found some peace.
Thanks for the reminder. You are missed, DFW.
.
Yes, you are missed.
I can’t imagine any better way to commemorate the occasion than to read today’s IS-determined ration of IJ. The soul-communion that occurs when one mindfully reads something truly well-written is the best way we can keep the author alive.
Yes, missed. Very sad today. Thank you for IJ and an Infinite Summer.
The first I heard of DFW was when I read his obit online in the NY Times (okay – I live in Perth, Western Australia – forgive me, it’s the upper-middle of nowhere). I bought Infinite Jest nearly six months ago and wrangled and wrestled for 200 pages before plopping into the warm honey that is this book. The first I heard of Infinite Summer was days after I’d finished reading IJ and was scrambling to understand the enormity and power of this experience I’d just had, all by myself, no-one to talk to or share with. I have since ordered every word ever written by this brilliant man, and I have been feeling weirdly bereft and bereaved in a kind of retrospect way, again, with no-one to talk to about it. I miss David Foster Wallace and the title of this post made me feel less strange, creepy and obsessed for feeling so. So thanks.
This is exactly how I feel, thank you for articulating it better than I could.
And Lo,.
Those words make me cry every time I read them.
And lo, indeed.
When I saw this post, I thought of this:
“What happens to people will never tell you how they feel; the alien observer misunderstands everything; only he understands a mind who can share its free and comic expression” George Santayana, -George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith, 250-51
But what is it to you miss someone who knew you so well? It’s our own solipsism but he made us all feel less alone. And loved.
Coming up on the end of InfSum, combined with this. These have has weighing on my spirit all day. I think my next read will have to be another DFW, not GravRain.
Every single time that I’ve read a few pages of IJ (this summer) and put it down, I’ve been impressed by DFW’s genius and I’ve felt sad that he’s not around to weave more of his magic.
DFW – you are in here.
“It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone — intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.”
A nail hit firmly on the head, by the man himself.
http://www.salon.com/09/features/wallace2.html
well I DID read Infinite Jest over the summer, the whole thing, on my Kindle, from start to finish including all the footnotes.
and I hadn’t even heard of this website/blog, until I was more than halfway through the book and someone sent me a link.
and I’m sorry I didn’t check out any of DFW’s work while he was still alive.
[...] David Foster Wallace’s death this weekend: Infinite Summer ran a great piece, and found the best DFW line to sum up how the feeling of his death; McSweeney’s has a bunch of memorial pieces; Howling Fantods links to some others. We know [...]
Through his words and his imagination both his lived and his considered experiences have come to life in me, and I imagine, in so many of us, and in us he lives on as some indelible dye will become part of great quantities of certain garments.
Ubi caritas est vera deus ibi est.