“What the really great artists do, and it sounds very trite to say it out loud, but what the really great artists do is that they are entirely themselves, they’ve got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic, and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”  — David Foster Wallace, w/r/t David Lynch’s Blue Velvet

Any attempt at a tribute here will sound trite itself, so let me just say, for a matter of record: The recent loss of David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, a book that I not only felt in my nerve endings, but seemed to pluck at them and make them resonate in a way, is one that I feel personally. He was an absolutely brilliant mind, to whom nothing could be properly condensed, nothing satisfactorily served justice or aptly described. He reveled in not the black and white, but maddening drizzle-gray, an area of endless possibility and zero answers, and an uncomfortable, lonely place.

Gone the way of James Incandenza, the noise silenced, the inner monologue ended, a horrible side-effect of terrifying genius.

In the last few weeks I have been revisiting “Consider the Lobster”, and in particular “Up, Simba” (or at least that’s what it was called in this book), but the article he wrote for Rolling Stone about the McCain 2000 campaign. I came home on Saturday to find the hard cover chewed completely off by my dog, who had never done anything like that before. Then back to the study to read the news. Then back out to the coffee table, to look at the crumpled front page and chew marks in the book’s spine. I found this much sadder than it should have been.

RIP DFW. Eschaton forever.

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