Quote du Jour: Awesome

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A line from a David Foster Wallace story with a title too long to cite:

xxxxHer nipples the color of a skinned knee.

What a tender and subtle image of the human condition!
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Reflections: Time Outed

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It is time that tortures us. Man’s whole effort is to escape from it, that is to say, to escape from past and future by embedding himself in the present, or else by inventing a past and a future to suit himself. ~ Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks

Perhaps you are still young, at an age where time seems to be a restless waiting for things to happen, every minute, every hour, every day, week, month, year, one more obstacle on a long and winding road that surely leads to some vague, but special, event that is always coming, always about to manifest itself as your own, unique, reward. Just for being. Just for that.

Or maybe you are no longer so very young and have learned to ignore horizons and to stare only toward those things which present themselves within your reach. Perhaps your vision, your perception of time, has become the radius of a comfortable circle, within the familiar confines of which alternating bouts of work and entertainment join forces to distract your attention, so that time hardly seems a factor in your busy, your important, your so very centered, life.

But, then again, perhaps maturity, or—as is the case w/r/t the precocious observations of David Foster Wallace which follow—an abnormally acute gift for pattern recognition, has rendered you vulnerable to recognition of time’s literal, rather horrible, realities:

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.*

Keep this phrase in your mind: “…like a thief in the night.”

Dig it.

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* David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
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Reflections: On Humility and Bathroom Etiquette

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The following two excerpts seem to be complementary:

1. Description of the work-life of a men’s room attendant, from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace:

The trick of his demeanor is to appear only provisionally there, to exist all and only if needed. Aid without intrusion. Service without servant. No man wants to know another man can smell him. Millionaires who do not tip. Natty men who splatter the bowls and tip a nickel. Heirs who steal towels. Tycoons who pick their noses with their thumb. Philanthropists who throw cigar butts on the floor. Self-made men who spit in the sink. Wildly rich men who do not flush and without a thought leave it to someone else to flush because this is literally what they are used to – the old saw Would you do this at home.

2. A briefer, but more universal, description of the proper attitude towards man's lot in life, from The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka, No. 52:

In the struggle between yourself and the world, hold the world’s coat.

In other words, in this life, a little humility is called for.
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Quote du Jour: A Do-It-Yourself Kit

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Below are sequential excerpts from a telephone conversation between the central protagonist of David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest and his older brother, Orin. FWIW, the conversation orbits around the topic of their father's suicide; an act accomplished by baking his head in a specially-rigged microwave oven. The speaker is "Hal":

‘The new Discursive O.E.D. says the Ahts of Vancouver used to cut virgins’ throats and pour the blood very carefully into the orifices of the embalmed bodies of their ancestors.

[…]

‘Apparently the Ahts tried to fill up ancestors’ bodies completely with virgin-blood to preserve the privacy of their own mental states. The apposite Aht dictum here being quote “The sated ghost cannot see secret things.” The Discursive O.E.D. postulates that this is one of the earlier on-record prophylactics against schizophrenia.’

So there you have it. Sort the symbols; construct your own metaphors of self-reference. Have fun with it. GGFN.
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Quote(s) du Jour: The Big Nada

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Stolen from the late David Foster Wallace and aphoristically retooled by your humble host for presentation here:

The epitome of savoir-faire is to know exactly where on the inside of the stall door to carve BEWARE OF LIMBO DANCERS

And,

As Socrates is reported to have said when handed the hemlock, “Life sucks and then spits you into a Dixie cup.”

It is easy to say that the suicide of David Foster Wallace was the result of chronic depression. But the embedded humor in the second (if you'll excuse the term) gag above suggests that he may have suffered from Gnostic tendencies; and the first hints strongly of an acute, urgent, and intractable precosity which may have become unbearable as he entered middle age.

R.I.P - Playing Catch-up

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The miniscule, but exclusive, clique of high-minded readers who have been visiting Rodak Riffs since its launching are familiar with my practice of noting the deaths of prominent writers. It was anomalous, then, that I let the recent suicide of postmodernist superstar, David Foster Wallace, go by without mention. I neither linked to the NY Times obit, nor to any of the several articles that were published about him in the aftermath of his death.

Partially, it was just too depressing: he was very young. Partially, I didn’t feel that I knew him well, having read only one book of his short stories, and having failed to tackle his magnum opus, the 1000-page novel Infinite Jest. which had been just too difficult, too long, and not of the right tenor to suck me in on the occasion of my having taken it out of the library a couple of years ago. I read the first 100 or so pages and gave up.

Since his death, however, I have read his story collection Oblivion, and have almost finished another: Girl With Curious Hair. The last piece in the latter is a very long story, or novella entitled “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” of which I am about half way through. It is very funny, in my opinion. The following excerpt is a good example of that humor.

Here we see a market research operative named Hogan in an airport in Illinois. He is there in connection with the arrival for a grand reunion of all the people who have ever appeared in a McDonald’s commercial. We overhear him speaking to two of the arriving former commercial actors. The subject of his discourse is his boss, J.D. Steelritter, the adman behind the McDonald’s commercials since day one:

“… This man is a genius. It’s an honor to even do market research for J.D. Steelritter. Even in this God-forsaken place.” He looks around as if for eavesdroppers. “This is the man, this is the legendary man, I’m sure you two know, who eventually got Arm and Hammer baking soda customers to start pouring the stuff down the drain. As…get this…drain freshener!” He licks a bit of sweetener off the heel of his hand. “Is that genius? Is that textbook planned-obsolescence, or what? And all off fear. J.D. eventually figured out that anybody who’d buy a box of baking soda out of fear of refrigerator odor wouldn’t hesitate one second to shell out for another box to prevent drain odor.” He laughs a marvelous laugh. “Drain odor? What’s that, for Christ’s sake? It’s just fear. Very careful research, fear, and the vision of a genius."

Prior to this scene, Hogan had been engaged in fear research in the airport in the conduct of which he had been handing out money in exchange for having his targets name their worst fear. Says Hogan:

“I ask the person who’s taking the money to name, right off the top of their head, what they fear most in the whole world. Their one great informing fear.”

The list of the fears named, as Hogan recites them, is darkly hilarious – my favorite one being:

“That I die and go to heaven and I get there and it stops being heaven because I’m there.”

I don’t know about you, but I can relate to that. I pray that the very talented, super-intelligent, and sadly funny, David Foster Wallace, who finally lost his battle with chronic depression, was not prophetic in writing those words.

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