Sadly, I learned from of all places a friend’s Facebook status that one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, died at age of 46 of an apparent suicide this past weekend.
The NYT obit on DFW is a well written, well researched piece on the author. As they put it, he wrote “prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging, philosophically probing and culturally hyper-contemporary novels, stories and essays.” That is quite a mouthful but I couldn’t agree more.
Infinite Jest, the book that he is most well known for, is one of my all time favorite books. This is due in large part to the effort I expended and the difficulty I had in reading it coupled with the satisfaction I gained by finishing it. I would equate the experience with climbing an arduously steep and rugged mountain which at its apex gives way to the most extraordinary view imaginable. Other than The Silmarillion, which took me three attempts to read, I cannot recall a bigger literary challenge that I faced and won.
Not only was he a terrifically inventive novelist, he a great essayist (which is a dying – no pun intended – art) as well. When I went to the US Open for the first time last year to see Andy Roddick play Roger Federer, I brought DFW 6,000 plus word essay from 2006 titled Federer as Religious Experience with me to re-read on the train. Luckily the train ride took awhile because like all DFW pieces, it was dense, fun and damn good.
As Gawker notes, this terrible occurance was sort of preordained. In a 2005 speech at Kenyon College implied, he was not unfamiliar with the heft of existence:

[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Thanks Dahlia for inspiring me to read Infinite Jest.
Goodbye David. The world just lost a brilliant mind.