This essay deals with suicide.
If youâre reading this and feeling overwhelmedâif youâre thinking about hurting yourself, or if the pain feels too heavy to holdâplease stop scrolling and reach out for help.
You do not have to carry this alone.
There are people trained to listen, without judgment, and they will answer when you call.
In the U.S.: Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifelineâavailable 24/7, free and confidential.
Text-only option: You can also message "HELLO" to 741741 to speak with a trained crisis counselor via the Crisis Text Line.
Outside the U.S.: Visit findahelpline.com to locate immediate mental health support in your country.
These are not just emergency numbers.
These are lifelines.
They are for anyone on the edge, anyone feeling stuck, scared, numb, or feeling like they've had enough.
You are not weak for needing help. You are human. And you are not alone.
Please save these resources. Share them. Use them.
The world is better with you in it.
When I entered the Bowling Green State University Creative Writing BFA Program in the Fall of 1996, the literary world got turned upside down by the publication of a massive novel called Infinite Jest, which wasnât just a novel; the book was a brain-breaking indictment of the modern age with a horrible revelation about the future. In 1996, David Foster Wallaceâs success and achievement in literary fiction (meaning âwriting with a focus on using words as artâ or âprose as poetryâ) was the best reception a writer of complex fiction could hope to achieve.
It turned out the guy was also miserable beyond words.
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Twelve years after brave lovers of literature purchased this three-pound, one-thousand-seventy-nine-page inconvenience, David Foster Wallace hung himself on his back porch in Claremont, California. He was forty-six years old and rumored to have been working on a master opus that would dwarf Infinite Jest in ambition, scale, and complexity.
The world is never ready for the suicide of immense talent. It is to David Foster Wallaceâs credit that it has taken years, books, and moviesâ worth of time to work through what his loss continues to mean for a world that barely understood the importance of what he was trying to convey through his art.
There are moral and emotional human challenges that only movies seem to help us work through and transcend to a higher level of consciousness. Movies are a magic trick played on the human mind through a limitation in human visual perception. Pushing light at a steady pace through a projector allows human beings to time-travel and prototype complex situations to derive simple meanings. The purpose of critical analysis is to extrapolate those simple meanings from art and apply their lessons in useful ways for our universal life purpose, which is to become better morally behaved biological creatures while in competition for the same scarce resources, which we use for survival, comfort, and to establish and maintain the security of the common good.
The 2015 film The End Of The Tour works hard to figure out why a brilliant, talented person would do such an awful thing to himself and the world. The movie is based on a book sourced from transcripts of recordings taken by a pop culture journalist and fiction writer named David Lipsky, working for Rolling Stone Magazine in 1996.
Rolling Stone didnât interview many literary fiction authors in the 1990s, but in the insulated world of creative literary fiction, doing what David Foster Wallace had just done with Infinite Jest was nearly a miracle. Wallace was as successful as one could hope to become as a "serious" writer, and his performance had broken through the literary bubble into influential channels of mainstream commercial art, validated through mass media, drawing critics like sharks to a bloody shipwreck. Wallace was on the critical radar, and his success made him a legitimate target for inspection and judgment.
Wallace had the awards, accolades, and the work he produced as evidence of his nearly solipsistic genius. Throw a three-pound book at someone, and they will either catch it or suffer the consequences. The reason Rolling Stone sent David Lipsky to the Midwest in the middle of Winter in 1996 was that no other writer alive at that time commanded the English language like David Foster Wallace. Indeed, none applied that language to a remarkably long work of literary fiction that conveyed something potentially important and possibly critical knowledge for the uncertain digital future looming in â96.
Infinite Jest was significant at the dawn of the commercial internet because it captured the worldâs attention through traditional mass media, including newspaper and periodical reviews, radio interviews, and even occasional television appearances. The book had something simple to say, but that simplicity was locked behind a great complexity of presentation. In this, the book was as modern as Ulysses and The Sound And The Fury. Books like these are puzzles that offer revelations as a reward for the mental and emotional labor required to gain a working understanding of what they mean from every angle. I feel the same about Twin Peaks The Return.
But what Infinite Jest whispered to the reader, underneath the words on the page, was simply, Slow down and pay attention to how you spend time because thatâs how the world is about to fuck you and then fall apart.
This message was not to be found in the conclusion of a contemporary animated Disney movie or any serial mystery drama on network television at the time, with the lone exception of Twin Peaks. So, how does an artist continue living and working in the world when all they feel is a soul sucking void that drains their creative expression and steals their joy from the living moment? How does that magic trick work, exactly? This is the question at the heart of the film The End Of The Tour and will be the focus of this essay of analysis and appreciation for a movie that ambitiously sought to uncover why one of the greatest writers to live and work was unable to survive his demons, despite his many talents and blessings.
Was it possible a movie could help explain what happened to this hanged man, who chose to end his life while his wife was away for the evening, as the better option than living one more day? Thatâs a tall order to ask from any movie.
When I first watched The End Of The Tour, I was expecting a biopic about David Foster Wallace. I didn't get what I expected, and I was happy about it, because I havenât stopped thinking about the movie for ten years. It seemed there was a truth in the film, just below the surface, some hint of an answer that I was maybe frightened to explore in further depth. What I didn't realize on first watch is that the secret is revealed in spoken dialogue. Itâs not subtextual at all. However, I want to explore what is said throughout the film and why it remains meaningful.
New Critical Analysis eschews the creator for narrative and artistry. New Critics arenât concerned with what happens behind the camera. We are focused on screen, in sound, and what it all means. New Criticism is the death of Auteur Theory.
Letâs first explore what happens in the film The End Of The Tour, and then we shall apply it to the question of David Foster Wallaceâs life, his suicide, and what it all means years later.
The plot of this movie is situational. Two writers at the peak of their skills and careers come together for a weekend of conversation, travel, and awkward fellowship, revealing two terrible secrets about the future: a personal secret and a cultural one.
The movie begins twelve years after the events of the primary story. We start in September 2008, when the news of David Foster Wallaceâs suicide shocked the world. But for the viewer, we witness how his death activates memories in David Lipsky. These activated memories incite him to find the old tapes he recorded and listen to them, ghost voices from the past revealing something that maybe Lipsky has worked hard to suppress.
This movie's plot is a straightforward flashback, told from the perspective of a future tragedy. The viewer enters the story with secret knowledge provided not only by the introduction scenes, but also by the real-life event that occurred. The man killed himself. For now, though, letâs leave the real-life event outside the context of our focus on the film. Letâs accept what is presented on screen as valid within the context of the filmâs narrative. Letâs suspend our expectations and temporarily set aside our knowledge, putting on our focusing glasses with open minds.
And letâs be with this fictional version of a real-world author as he travels back in time, not just through memory, but listening to his voice speaking out from the milky past. And his voice is answered by a ghost. The audio tapes will serve as the mechanism of time travel in this film.
And here we are, back in 1996, where a man named David Foster Wallace has just published a 1,079-page novel that set the literary fiction world on fire. David Lipsky is a talented journalist at Rolling Stone Magazine who has also recently published a novel that seemed like a drop of water in the ocean during a rainstorm, while Infinite Jest was the rainstorm. Writers are a competitive bunch, and the only measures of swagger and braggadocio at the time were how many books you sold, what interviews you had done, and which âimportant peopleâ said they loved your book.
You can imagine why a talented writer is skeptical of another writerâs success. Letâs spend a moment and talk about success as a writer in 1996, and letâs expand this to exploring success in any category of commercial art at the time. The film does this very well in a scene where David Foster Wallace explains to Lipsky the no-win situation of being a popular author writing in the genre of literary fiction at the end of the Age of Celebrity.
"All I know is [Infinite Jest] is absolutely the best I could do between 1992 and 1995. If everybody had hated it, I wouldn't have been thrilled, but I don't think I'd have been devastated either. When you're used to doing heavy duty literary stuff that doesn't sell well, you accommodate that fact by the following equation: 'If something sells really well, gets a lot if attention, it's gotta be shit,â right? But the ultimate irony is that if your thing starts selling well, getting a lot of attention, the very mechanism you used to shore yourself up when your thing didn't sell well is now part of the darkness and nexus when it does, so you're totally screwed. You can't win.â
Skepticism was the calling card of my Generation X, and we feared selling out and losing our integrity more than anything. Can you imagine that now, from a generation of humans roaming this Earth? We cared about our reputations. For some of us, itâs all we had. Weâll revisit the fear of selling out later. Now, letâs navigate back to the scenes where Lipsky reads the massive novel that everyone he cares about is talking about. He recognizes the level of genius required to produce work of such ambition, scope, and beauty.
Part of him resents it, and the other half craves it. He asks for the assignment. This is now a mission for Lipsky to understand the creative force of energy that brought the book into bookstores and into the minds of the hundreds of people who read it, as well as the many thousands who bought it but never got around to reading it. Wallaceâs work commanded valuable attention, and any work of art that accomplished that in 1996 was worth inspection, analysis, and scrutiny.
After all, itâs not easy to take over another humanâs mind through meticulously placed symbols on page and screen and use that connection to insert a story. Itâs not easy, but it is possible to write a story so sublime that when another person interprets it, their soul shifts in orbit from the experience; their anxiety breaks when they rise out of themselves; and their hearts open to something more than drudgery and disappointment underneath the deflated reality of time blurting out its last gasp of air for each of us. Life can be more when it is consistently transcended.
Itâs not a mystery that we all die, and our lives will likely not mean a thing beyond our immediate family and friends remembering us with fondness or trauma. But for some people, wrestling with that simple truth of the inevitable dissolution of everything is an existential crisis they cannot accept. For others, the eventual ending of sorrow and restraint is a cause for celebration, an incitement to live the life we are each blessed to experience, however long each of us has on Earth. Placing a frame around an image allows the viewer to derive perspective and meaning; similarly, living a meaningful life requires a non-discriminatory approach when it comes to letting go of it all.
No regrets. No hard feelings.
Lipsky, recognizing genius and skilled in getting the story behind the story, sets out on a quest to interview this seemingly brilliant, handsome, privileged white male author and find out just who the fuck this ânormal guyâ thinks he is to write such a long and vital book. How dare he even try, much less succeed?
In the movie, these â90s new men fall fast into writer-love at first sight and immediately start wrestling worldviews underneath their pleasantries. But eventually, the niceties drop away, and this film becomes a war of words, ideas, hurt feelings, and those two terrible truths I mentioned earlier.
The primary conflict in this movie is between two artists who both understand that the world outside their heads is false and dangerous, but neither understands how to deal with that false world other than putting more words down on paper and screen. And neither one seems to believe any amount of words, no matter how cleverly constructed, will make an impactful difference to whatâs coming for us all, whatâs coming for the world.
"Reading you is another way of meeting you,â Lipsky explains to Wallace as a possibility for his sudden and seemingly unwanted level of fame, the very fame that Lipsky craves as validation for his work. How can someone so talented be so dismissive and flippant towards these milestones of success, which feel out of reach to Lipsky, despite his reasonable success as a writer?
But despite their commonalities at the end of an age when critics raved about and people paid to read the stories of world-talented white men with middle-class struggles, Lipsky and Wallace are two very different people in this movie. They see the world in fundamentally different ways. And one of them doesnât have much time left on Earth. These writers are bent in alternate directions. But Lipsky also yields to Wallaceâs sublime talent. He has to because itâs what lesser artists do when the real thing confronts them. It can become an existential crisis when someone who has talked about being an artist their whole life, maybe even produced a few works of value, but doesnât have the accolades to prove their talent socially, meets someone who has earned those accolades with stunning art that shakes the world.
Lipsky takes every compliment from Wallace as a veiled insult. "You flatter me but you're just patronizing," he says in an unguarded and vicious moment of heated exchange, which came after a civil altercation the night before, when Wallace perceived Lipsky to be hitting on an old girlfriend and warned Lipsky to "Be a good guy." Wallace castigated a brutal moral judgment on Lipsky, which revealed the very moral superiority Wallace has been working so hard to invalidate in front of this probable enemy and maybe friend.
Wallace tells him flat out that he knows he has no power over how Lipsky will weigh his character against his talent. It was once a crucible of success for monoculture artists to endure this critical analysis of mainstream journalism. This was an age where selling out got you kicked out of the cool club. And Lipsky had the power to define Wallaceâs character. Now, he couldnât touch Wallace on the page, but what Lipsky was doing was outside the page, and thatâs where Wallace was vulnerable. Infinite Jest held a secret that nearly killed him before he started writing it.
Ultimately, Lipsky is looking to grill Wallace on his attempted suicide six years before their weekend together and two years before Wallace started working on the novel that heralded the suicidal shift of the modern world into whatever hellscape it is we're living through now. And Lipsky was also looking to identify if heroin or another abused substance was a crutch of Wallace's genius, but Wallace sniffed this out like a bloodhound and threw it in Lipsky's face like a glove slap in the 1700s. Wallace stopped playing subtextual games and called Lipsky out directly. The journalist responded by accusing Wallace, "You still feel like you're smarter than other people...it's part of your social strategy...It's so obvious how you hold back your intelligence to be with people who are younger than you, not as agile as you." This accusation wounded Wallace because it may have been true, and his defense in the movie was to shut down for hours of non-screen movie time.
The final meaningful interaction between the writers occurred after both had gone to bed, still angry. Wallace offered his guest room to Lipsky on the first night because he seemed to have been a kind, midwestern citizen of the world. Wallace knocked on his guest's door to ask if Lipsky was still awake. He was. What transpires in that moving conversational scene is a revealed truth so impactful and horrible that it causes Lipsky to break into silent tears and seek refuge in writing a note before he forgets what just happened, probably hoping he does. In this scene lies an admission that could be an explanation for Wallaceâs failed suicide attempt, and an eerie premonition about his successful suicide to come.
They went to bed and woke up distant friends, having shared something as intimate as a non-sexual encounter can be, where they understand each other from a revelation of pain so deep that there is no cure other than enduring suffering for one more day.
The movie ends as it began, in the aftermath of David Foster Wallace's suicide, twelve years after this strange weekend these two brilliant men spent together. Only now, the viewer is confronted with the specter of what Wallace revealed late that nightâthe secret inadequacy at the heart of every prophet who sees the future and feels powerless to change it. And yet they suffer until they are relieved of that suffering. The best stories are told by the talented and aware who survived to tell the tale. This is what happens in the film The End of the Tour. Now, letâs explore why it matters and what it means.
Let's begin our exploration of meaning and matter in this film by situating the novel Infinite Jest in context, to understand why it was such a significant phenomenon in 1996. Like, you mean a book mattered that much? Yes, to many of us, it did. That book was a promise fulfilled for young writers. The example we young writers needed to see was that it was possible to make challenging but rewarding art that was commercially validated. Art that said something, making money. This was the way. However, it was a difficult path, and there were painful casualties along the way, including sensitive individuals who didnât survive the void of fame.
Recall, Infinite Jest was published barely two years after the most successful rock musician in the world at the time put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. Some of why he did that was about what he saw when he got to the top of the ladder of commercial success, a truth so universal that Bob Dylan made it a song titleâBeyond Here Lies Nothing.
Kurt Cobain and David Foster Wallace both peered into the void and didnât like what they saw while gazing down into the dark secret from very different angles and perspectives. And their expressions of art in response to the horror they perceived were equally unique, though intimately connected at the gnarled root. After all, itâs the same void at the end of everyoneâs story, despite whatever offering of faith gives us comfort. No one knows because the void of direct experience is the truth.
What can you do with a fact but accept it? And what was it about Infinite Jest that caused fiction readers and art literati, from elitist critics down to the almost-rejected art student (like me), to buy that three-pound book and lug it around for months while we pretended to understand what we were reading, confused in small sections?
Was the book really that important to warrant all that fuss?
Was it even a good story? A page turner?
Would they adapt it into a movie? Could we just wait for the movie?
The interesting answer about making a movie is that Infinite Jest was the first book to outwrestle movies. This novel boxed movies in. Long before Infinite Jest, movies were often the more widely embraced expression of a narrative than a novel. The premium experience of storytelling was the movies and TV shows that ate novels and short stories to spit them out in a more consumable (and therefore profitable) fashion.
Movies are small businesses made by teams of people working together to produce art and educational stories that help the world grow in wisdom, awareness, and empathy. Just kidding, movies and TV shows were made to entertain and manipulate you through cultural normalization, which is injected by consistently replicated and easily meme-able moral behaviors, and (most importantly) to sell you goods and services through advertisements and strategic product placement that churn your life moments into seeds of sadness, which make money for other people.
Infinite Jest remains an indictment of the cruel predation of moving images telling stories for profit. Infinite Jest eats all the movies. It eats music, every song. It eats other books. It eats politics and religion. It eats science. It eats history and the human soul, bit by bit, click by click, minute by minute until the days bleed away through years and all the joy has been seeped from life like a grey flood. Thatâs what Infinite Jest is, and David Foster Wallaceâs deepest fear for America was that we might endure a complete institutional self-destruction of civility and integrity. Spoiler alert!
Wallaceâs book prophesied what would happen when traditional mass media got set ablaze by the Internet, fueled by cheap, meaningless, and mean entertainment-for-profit. Wallace saw this thirty years ago and tried to warn the most intelligent people using the most innovative and clever method he could think of, which was to smuggle it into the higher collective frontal lobe of our cultural consciousness by telling a complex story that most people wouldnât work through long enough to access the subversive part. But the ones who did never thought or felt the same afterwards.
In 1996, America was going through a phase some smart people in colleges called "Postmodern Irony," and it was about as cynical as we could get, just shy of an armed rebellion if we werenât all so lazy and half-armed. Generation X was so full of ourselves that we soaked in tepid pop culture bathtubs every day and night. Popping bottles of celebrity juice to pop music, metal, punk rock, and rap. And we had the best movies ever made. Movies that said things to our hearts. And the cannabis smoked strongly, even if it was harder to get.
In our quiet moments and stoned late-night conversations, the honesty of my generation felt the world of these Boomers and Greatest Generation was bullshit, and more than a few of us wanted nothing to do with it. We wanted out of the bullshit, but we still wanted to love, laugh, fuck, and drink liquor. Eventually, the world would come to claim Generation X and all the other generations with its dumb War on Terror and the chain of disasters that followed and continue like a never-ending hemorrhoid. However, in 1996, some of us felt that we still had a choice about how to live and how we spent our time together in public spaces, regardless of who we voted for in the last election.
In 1996, MFA and BFA programs taught minimalism through the short story form and prosaic poetry as the primary methods of instruction and evaluation for creative writing performance at the University level. Raymond Carver was the minimalist god of short fiction, and almost no one spoke out against him in classes across the nation. But American culture was ready for a new expression of fiction, something opposite of minimal. America wanted writing that filled the balloon until it stretched to its limit, and then we wanted a pin-prick of genius to pop that balloon.
Infinite Jest descended on fiction like a portal to another universe uncovered in an ancient desert mesa. Suddenly, it was just there, and the place it took the patient reader to was otherworldly, yet not so distant and different that it wasn't also a familiar place. The book had a gate, but it wasn't one of intelligence; it was instead the ability to pay sustained attention. Prolonged, sustained attention was the key to unlocking this strange and long work of maximalist American literature, as well as the antidote to the disease in the book.
The key attribute of Infinite Jest is that it becomes funny the instant you understand what it is trying to convey, which, at the risk of oversimplifying a work of genius, is "This whole world is a pleasure scam to steal your joy of living away. Why are you letting it?" Infinite Jest identified nearly 30 years ago that human attention would become the most valuable economic commodity in recorded history. What people listen to, watch, and read would have an enormous impact on what they do or do not do, and how they behave. In the movie, Wallace reveals the painful cultural truth I promised to point out earlier, expressing this truth in the following direct dialogue:
"I'm not saying that watching TV is bad or a waste of your time anymore than masturbation...it's a pleasurable way to spend a few minutes. But if you're doing it twenty times a day,...if your primary sexual relationship is with your own hand, something is wrong. What you're really doing, I think, is you're running a movie in your head. You're having a fantasy relationship with someone that is not real, strictly to stimulate a neurological response. So, as the Internet grows in the next ten to fifteen years and virtual reality pornography becomes a reality, we're going to have to develop some machinery in our guts to turn off sheer unalloyed pleasure, or...I'm going to have to leave the planet. Because the technology is only going to get better and better and it's going to get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that's fine, in low doses, but if it's the basic main staple of your diet, you're going to die in a very meaningful way."
Personally, despite understanding the book was genius, I didnât find it enjoyable to read because it required hard work and attention in an age where human attention was already being digitally fracked for profit, and this has only worsened and become more disastrous for human joy since 1996. Too much of the current global population of human beings has become what David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest attempted to warn us about so long ago, a legion of lonely people sitting in weepy rooms scrolling away their lives and joy until only nubs of their lifespark are left in puddles on sad floors of grey homes barely inhabited under perpetually cloudy skies, the kinds of places where the only comfort is the fellowship of ghosts floating near each other, locked in space but somehow beyond time.
It turns out that placing vital social knowledge behind a puzzle wall of words is not the most effective way to disseminate an idea. Perhaps Wallace didnât receive this memo, given the mixed legacy the book acquired in the years after its release and subsequent near-forgotten status. Instead of going mainstream, he began writing what he hoped was a magnum opus, The Pale King. It was rumored to be even more ambitious and dense than its predecessor.
The End Of The Tour is meaningful because, without noise, it delivers what happened when an astute reader and competent writer meets more than his equal for a mental battle. Lipsky's mission in this movie was to find a way to either deify or crucify David Foster Wallace in 1996, because that is what the mono-culture media did to make money.
Instead, Lipsky was exposed to the secret heart of American suffering as the generation that feared selling out more than anything faced the inevitable conclusion that we were all sold out long before we were born, and that we are each living in the aftermath of the death of an illusion. Still, many of us remain unaware because we lack the language or concepts to comprehend that complex and awful truth.
During the revelation scene for the painful personal truth I informed you of earlier, Wallace gently opens the door and barely enters his guest bedroom to wake his guest and tenderly reveal a secret so horrible that it had to be locked away with all those words. This scene features a final confrontation between an author who wrote a serious novel that briefly garnered mass media attention, with a message about the dangers of mass media, and the author sent to validate or destroy him.
Earlier, Wallace admitted to Lipsky, "My primary addiction in my life has been to television." Then, acknowledging his temporary fickle success, Wallace diagnoses himself, "Reality is I'm 34 years old, alone in a room with a piece of paper." Finally, he begins to reveal the terrible secret he has been holding inside.
"I don't have a diagnosis for why we feel so empty and unhappyâŠI lived an incredibly American life, this idea that if I could just achieve x and y and z, that everything would be okay.â
Wallace then tells a story from his book about people leaping to their deaths from a burning building (portending what would happen only five years later on 9/11), begging the question, "What could be so awful that leaping to your death would be an escape from it?" From here, Wallace opens his box of pain and shares more than he should have about his potential suicide attempt two years before he began the work of writing and obsessively thinking about Infinite Jest. During those dramatic eight days, Wallace was institutionalized to prevent him from taking an action that would have dramatically impacted the world of human art in 1996. He describes his suffering:
"It's worse than any kind of physical injury. It may be in the old days what was known as a spiritual crisis, the feeling as though every axiom in your life turned out to be false and there was actually nothing. And you are nothing. And that it's all a delusion. And you're so much better than everybody because you can say that it's just a delusion and you're so much worse because you can't fucking function. It's really horribleâŠI don't think that we ever change. I'm sure that I still have those same parts of me. I'm trying really hard to find a way to not let them drive."
While explaining his past suicide attempt, he also writes a note for his unfortunate future successful one.
My first reaction was anger when I learned that David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, at the age of 46, by hanging himself on his back porch. But I felt sad when I learned he had spent time and effort preparing for his suicide, carefully laying out his final novel manuscript for The Pale King with specific instructions and a rumored personal note to his wife. This wasn't a dramatic and tense suicide like Kurt Cobain's. Unfortunately, David Foster Wallaceâs death was his final successful project.
And we come back to the question of why someone so talented, brilliant, and with so much potential would choose to end their life? I didn't know. Like many others, I felt the hole in the future of art when I learned of his death. Reality shuddered. It's hard to argue that the world has fallen to shit since 2008. Wallace predicted the self-destruction of our institutions, driven by waves of digital cruelty and IRL loneliness, which deliver damaging waves that seem to grow with intensity over time, amplified by the advancements of technology untethered from human morality.
The spirit of Christ most certainly does not compel America in 2025.
But 2008 was the year that broke America's brain. It was the year the monoculture ironically shattered (thus ending post-modern irony), and Wallaceâs worst fear became an inevitable reality: the complete self-destruction of Americaâs institutions because people no longer saw and heard each other anymore. They only saw flickering images of shades of humans who couldnât possibly also be alive and suffering.
2008 was the year of a shattered but shared reality, a year of dramatic change in America. The effects of what happened that year may still have the potential to bring down the American empire. And it was the year one of the greatest American writers since Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Vonnegut threw in his towel, leaving us with towers of words that few people are capable of reading and appreciating today.
In one of the film's most revealing moments, David Foster Wallace stakes his claim as an everyday guy who just pays more attention than most. He tells Lipsky, "Yes, I treasure my regular guy-ness. I think it's my biggest asset as a writer, that I'm basically just like everybody else." But Lipsky rightly calls bullshit:
"You don't crack open a thousand page book because you hear the author is a regular guy. You do it because he's brilliant. You want him to be brilliant. So, who the fuck are you kidding?"
Who was David Foster Wallace kidding? What kind of artist walks away from that kind of talent halfway through the game? This brilliant, privileged, and self-tormented white man of privileged letters broke all his vows when he bent to those parts he confessed to Lipsky in that late-night scene. Wallace was ultimately defenseless against those sad parts seeking to drive him into the ground in darkness. But the man never claimed to be perfect. Perhaps he was just too sensitive and intelligent to continue living in the world inside his head or the one outside.
This movie leaves me feeling melancholy, yet also appreciative of the ambition, obsession, and unalloyed talent that David Foster Wallace brought to our species during his too-short time on Earth.
We are not put here to write books and paint pictures.
We are not put here to make movies or start businesses.
We are not put here to work and pay taxes.
We aren't put here to get married or fall in love.
Human Beings are put here together on Earth to develop strong bonds with the other human beings with whom we share this brief life. And we are placed here to die, or rather, put here to learn to die slowly with grace if weâre lucky. The proof of this state of being is gratitude without regret. Youâll know youâve reached that goal when you have so much to say that you canât say a word. Itâs called gratitude. And thatâs right.
Seventy-five Summers. Thatâs what we get if weâre lucky. David Foster Wallace cashed out the rest of his Summers at 46 years old. During his half-life, he performed a nearly miraculous feat of art. But his legacy as a human living in the world was not as impressive. Art will not save the world inside or outside. Neither will politics, religion, science, or AI.
The only action that will save the world is letting it go and living in it with ease for whatever time we are blessed to do so. If we respect time by investing in creating safety and comfort with the people around us, small joys will creep back into our lives, and only then can we make our art in faith (not irony) and call our lives the good work.
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