There are already thousands of words in print that would serve as a finer and more worthy eulogy for David Foster Wallace than any of us could deliver. Let his own words bear his memory for us: The Broom of the System, The Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Oblivion, Consider the Lobster, Infinite Jest.
Whatever else I have to say is just personal, of limited public interest, and entirely insufficient to convey what exactly has been lost.
It is deeply weird to find myself suffering something like grief for a person with whom I am not personally acquainted; it is the very sort of phenomenon--how the deaths of famous persons affect us--on which David Foster Wallace might have discoursed with great insight and moral passion in one of his unforgettable essays. But it was a dark and awful feeling that descended on me when I read the headline late Saturday night nevertheless, one that transcended the disconnect of reading a stranger's obituary in The New York Times.
And it's because I've been reading DFW's work long enough, and from an impressionable enough age, that it has some claim to have formed who I am right now. This is the way the books we love affect us, change us, reform us, become a part of our mental atmosphere. It is not just that A Supposedly Fun Thing affected my thinking on television and media culture and David Lynch and tennis or forced me to examine with real seriousness and respect certain things, such as cruise ships or county affairs, that I might have otherwise dismissed unreflexively; or that The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest have permanently altered my sense of what novels can and should be; or that "Authority and American Usage," his murderously erudite essay on prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar, is making me terribly self-conscious about my inferior grasp of the grammatical, and therefore slightly undeserving of writing any sort of tribute to him; or that, when thinking of examples of ridiculously, inhumanly smart people, I tend to think of DFW before, say, Stephen Hawking. It is that this is all happening, and has been happening for years, without my thinking very much of it; these are all just elements of my personality now, and I acquired them from DFW's books.*
Something like this happens in the mind of every passionate reader; reading is partly a formation of a sensibility. Writers like DFW permanently alter us, and I guess that too can serve as a kind of eulogy.
*For example, it was very recently, during the U.S. Open, that I quite flagrantly went around espousing opinions I'd borrowed from DFW's essays on tennis ("Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness" and "Roger Federer as Religious Experience") and only occasionally realized that these statements were not, in fact, the product of original thought and observation.**
**I realize that it could be considered a little tacky to parody DFW's infamous footnoting habit at a time like this, but a newfound attitude towards footnotes (cherishing, delighting) is one of the gifts I have to thank him for.
Very touching Tricia. It's a huge loss and you provided a beautiful tribute.
My favorite author of all time...sad...thanks for posting this.
Last line of Infinite Jest (great last line, I think): "And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out."