/lit/ - Literature

>>22019143
DFW is the proof that neither your body(professional tennis player) nor your mind can save you from the pessimistic truth of life.

>>22019216
what truth?

>>22019143
I have never seen anyone become a better person over the long haul on account of popping prescription pills. I have watched the pills put people into a long downhill slide. Pills are bad news.

>>22019216
but dfw was a bit of a bitch if you're honest. he had a mental breakdown over the loneliness and impossibility of true connection, whereas other people just deal with it

>>22019231
lifes a bitch and then you die

>>22019143
All it takes is one bad day

>>22019250
sometimes you go on living

>>22019250
that's why we get high,
cuz you never know,
when you gonna go

>>22019231
read "the book of disquite" all of your questions will be answered

>>22019268
That is absolute bullshit.

>>22019242
No, Pascal brutally blackpilled him and him being an american he had no metaphysical background to fall back on just like Fitzgerald during his Crack Up era. He took the noble route and committed suicide.

Gay aids makes you suicidal

took goypills which makes you lose your mind, never trust their prescriptions

>>22019279
A lot of people are suicidal but they haven't experienced a truly bad day at a truly bad time. It's all i am saying.

>>22019309
and you are correct, I came close once

i would say that DFW had more reasons to kill himself than he let on in his work
whereas Hal and DWG are basically well intentioned guys with drug problems which harm themselves mostly (outside of DWG's accidental homicides and violence against other awful members of the criminal underworld he lived in) the real DFW's drug abuse turned him into a violent homicidal sexual predator and stalker
i never read anything in his work that seemed to be an effective strategy for fighting against the absolutely monstrous parts of himself, it seemed more like he engaged in an elaborate project of denial and intellectualization disguised as sincerity
not knocking his writing though, obviously, but you can't really think of Infinite Jest as anything other than a genius failure of a bildungsroman and mea culpa

>>22019293
How did he blackpill him?

>>22019143
From the man Himself:

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

>>22019485
>Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than “die,” “pass away,” the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday—’

>‘And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

>>22019516
>Herself

This guy deserved a worse death. Rest in piss.

i dont know how a smart guy like him couldn't figure out to turn to spirituality. he even talks about the benefits of choosing to worship THE INFINITE (god/krishna/wiccan mother goddess) instead of personal things like INTELLIGENCE, which he seemed to continue to do. he wouldve been powerful if he managed to overcome his narcissistic solipstistic suffering,,, well he was powerful nonetheless, he had some very very good insights, rip

>>22019143
I had the opposite reaction. Death was always on his mind.

>>22019658
To you, this are inescapable truths that apply to everyone. To me, this is the reality of not only being participating of the economy but to believe in everything that is important to herself. Time, money are valuable things but they are no more than a natural law for one, what sane person would complain about gravity, and societal systems, for two, who would complain about social manners? Who would think about being socially mannered and then regret that in two hundred years, other social manners will take the place of those of today? Stop being so obsessed with things that have no influence on you. Stop being so civilized. As someone who knows the heart of an animal almost as well as that of a human, nothing beats the attitude towards life that has the former: constant seek of pleasure, happy ignorance and an indifference for time and death.

>>22019692
when someone takes spirituality as a way to solve their issues they are moving away form interacting and solving them, while acknowledging they're there. It only makes things worse. Consuming spirituality as if it was a pill you took is a failure of both improving your life and connecting with a spiritual level.

>>22019658
I never got this fear. once you're dead you're dead, who cares who remembers you. the real tragedy is wasting your time on earth

>>22019710
i mostly disagree, yeah if you take "spirituality like a PILL", its not going to work, maybe a little placebo. psychologizing is a dead end, it always has and always will be. truly living in purpose and service of & along the lines of & with full belief and faith in THE INFINITE will solve a million more problems than interacting with something like your neverending nihilism.... i m o

>>22019685
inhuman

>>22019516
unexpectedly good read. Will have to give him a try, always saw him as a jerkoff material for /lit/

>>22019760
wait, you though DFW was just a meme?
He's sincerely good. Some prefer his short stuff or only his novels, like any good author it's not universal. But he defined american literature for a decade because he earned that role.

It's like saying Faulkner or Carver are a meme. Yes, they are, but they're also good.

>>22019698
>>22019723
I really think that some souls are predestined for fear of death.

>NATURE has been generous to none but those she has dispensed from thinking about death. The others she has condemned to the oldest fear and the most corro-sive one, without offering or even suggesting a means of recovery. If it is normal to die, it is not so to dally over death nor to think about it at every tum. The man who never takes his mind off it betrays his van-ity; since he lives in terms of the image others form of him, he cannot accept the notion that one day he will be nothing; oblivion being his continual night-mare, he is aggressive and bilious, and misses no op-portunity to display his temper, his bad manners. Is there not a certain inelegance in fearing death? This fear which preys on the ambitious leaves the pure untouched; it grazes them without taking hold. The rest suffer it testily and resent all those who simply do not experience it.

Cioran, The Fall Into Time

>>22019692
There is a very obscure interview with him (now on YouTube) that was recorded by a radio journalist but it was off the record in terms of it going to air since it was an hour or so long, and DFW was speaking as of no one would here it.
This is when he admitted that he is a platonist. I haven't been able to find the link even though I've searched and searched.
Anyone ever hear this?

>>22019143
It's almost as though idealists sublimate through their works and attempt to embody a defiant character that they themselves know the existence of is not possible. Jerome Siegel couldn't fly, ya know?

You don't write and speak incessantly of what it takes to cut through the bullshit if you yourself are having an easy time cutting through the bullshit.

guys i read in an article that all three incandenza brothers in infinite jest are suposed to represent DFW. that's big if true, I never saw someone on lit say that

>>22019890
IF YOU FIND IT DO PLEASE POST
>>22019941
writers dont go out to write 'this is me' characters, and when they do its really blatant like Stephen Dedalus. All three are in some ways like him, he is surely disseminated amongst all his characters, but at the end of the day they are fictional and he would know to respect that.

>>22019516
>herself
forced

>>22019767
Can't know for sure with this board (yes, this is my only exposure for literature discussions), just ordered my copy of his essays from Amazon.

>>22019685
>>22020037

It's in relation to a female character who we're following at this point in the narrative, so it's totally appropriate...

>>22020354
you don't need to explain shit to the dumbfucks who get triggered by the wrong pronouns

>>22019516
I didn't know that quote was his.

>>22019695
There seemed to be an undercurrent of existential despair in most of his writing. Topics like drug addiction, feelings of thwarted ambition despite success, post-modern absurdism when confronted with adulthood.

He seems like a talented depressive to me who lacked interesting perspective on life and preferred expressing existential despair. But I pretty much only got through half of IJ. His books might be more interesting to young people than they should be what with the existential angst. I think that's why he gets railed against so much.

>>22019143
he was dishonest. you can see the comparison between the good he make deep psychology when he write about "pessimist" things vs the sappy he is when he write to make some solitude about how the world needs kindness.

>>22020395
does that make one dishonest? for a while i thought the short story Good Old Neon was the ultimate way to read DFW aka narcissistic, deeply unempathetic, solipsistic but my views changed when i realized more the deep connection between solipsism/narcissism and suffering. how can you truly write about red when all you've seen is blue?

Suicide is rarely a rational decision. Your reality get's warped little by little.

>>22020419
he can (and should) accept that feelings and thoughts he have and his hard consequences. there are few honest people anyway. cioran was honest, i dont know, pessoa was honest. when you have a difficult mind the worst you can do is try to make yourself some embodiment of positive thinking because you end up doing a long circumlocution to say what a 50´s housewife would say.
his suicide proves that he was only in one side of the things. you can see it in his works. he is concrete, hard, insightful, when he talk about despair and how despair is in the head of someone. he is bland, vague, auto-sanctified when he talk about solutions to that despair. you know, or at least i perceive he really is just trying to convince himself. also, the pills dont help, if you have the capacity of someone like dfw to introspection, the time you lose with pills is a time that you cant really never gonna recover. the time you should have to introspect and know harshly and deep yourself its wasted with pills, you are condemning yourself to a half-assed introspection and knowledge of yourself to alleviate a pain.

it just makes me sad. he seemed like such a smart and interesting dude.

>>22019216
Which suggests to me only the Zen doctrine of no-mind could have saved him.

>>22020479
I think maybe that quote from anna karenina applies here, despair might be a more complex emotion than happiness. I totally get what you're saying, but he did have his moments of brilliance when describing the overcoming of negativity, especially in pale king

>>22020584
happiness is simple. but overcoming despair is not simple at all (usually you find despair after some deconstruction of happiness so you simply just cant go back... once you have it you will always have it.). thats why you always have this sensation of phoniness when people try to give some new outlook to a profound and necessary insightful despair (remember, despair in people like dfw is after some deconstrucion, so its very introspective and penetrative. people usually despair because their ilusions fall apart but they feel it, they dont think about it, so they just gonna make another illusion after some time and thats all. thats all they know about despair, that moment between ilusions).
i love pale king. but in the end he is still much better explaining the despair that the notion of overcoming it. i read it long time ago so im not remember well.
but his notion of we need more boredom and responsibility, or a fair respect to one another. specially the boredom and responsability always sounds false and desperate to me. i appreciate he try to say something insightful about that, and he have a point, its like his fight with post-modernism, i understand that consequences of post-modernism are shit and is virtually impossible to have a cohesive society with that kind of arguments. but we have to remember that post-modernism is basically right. subjectivism is the real end of individuality. i dont know what is the solution, but i think dfw try to go back in a way and try to make responsability and respect great again with not much argument. he maybe just try to give a hint to the solution, but we need some insightful introspective guy who understand the solution and say it like he write about despair (like he really know it.). dont know, maybe we have to be like that guy of the book who is always good no matter what. but... come on... he wasnt honest when he write about it, that was what i was trying to say.

Believe me or not, I don't care, but I'll share this. I have it on good source (family friend was a student of his) that sometime during his peak (after the publication of IF) Mason & Dixon was published and he would constantly just randomly bring it up in his creative writing class. Apparently he would praise it on how he'd never be able to write something like that while also occasionally mocking Pynchon/Pynchon's style and swearing he wasn't influenced by him. The source said he seemed pretty depressed about it.

Anyway, the guy read both books and realized he'd never be able to write anything close as good as so he changed majors and ended up becoming a sociology professor, lol.

>>22020770
>>22020584
also, he should have take the dostoievski route and be desperately and agressive spiritual in his conclusions, its really his underlying narrative even if he just cant accept it, he just was too much inside the academic science-is-cool bubble. who knows if he live a little more?. but now that i think about, i think he have more possibilitIes to end as a new ager buddhist meditation-is-great slog more than a crazy christian trying to unite the hearts of people.

>>22020797
Pinecone... killed Walrus?

>>22020820
shit...I didn't mean to imply that. It was just an anecdote about his mindset. Like, even when he was being regarded as the greatest contemporary writer and IF was being lauded like nothing else he would still find ways to be depressed about it.

>>22019658
>he hasnt taken the reincarnation pill

>>22020833
So what you're saying is that Pynchon murdered Wallace and framed it as a suicide?

>>22019143
>>22019238
I remember reading on the last psychiatrist when he died that withdrawal from the anti depressants he was on might of caused him to commit suicide.