'Till human voices wake us…'

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table…
—T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

David Foster Wallace is dead. He hanged himself while his wife was out.

I can't respect that: it's selfish, it's horrible, it's pathetic, it's evil; to disregard someone you ostensibly love, or even once loved; to not factor in the very real, very tangible people in your life—and, judging from the obituaries I've been reading, there were many: Wallace was survived not only by his wife, but by both parents and a sister; he was beloved by his students and respected by his colleagues, to boot—is to be so willfully self-centered and short-sighted that one reduces the vast universe to only two entities: oneself and everything else, which is precisely what Wallace warned against in every one of his works that I've read: the worst type of hypocrisy.

The thought that he did think this through, that he did take all of these factors into account and went ahead with it anyway? That thought terrifies me and may keep me awake for days.

Wallace was one of my favorite writers: brilliant, imaginative, unflinching. He was in that rare strata of writers like Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick and Herman Melville: I can't read their books over and over the way I'm fond of doing with lighter fare because their books change the way I think and feel about myself and the world. Their writing is like surgery, requiring a balance of surrender and expertise, numbness and unwavering attention, plus thought and pain and swathes of your own blood until you come through the other side of the book raw and aching but much better than before.

Wallace's work was brutally funny and tenderly horrifying and laced around and through with irony. But the irony was not, as with so many postmodern writers, there to separate and protect the author from the reader—he was right there with you, saying, "My God, man! Isn't it funny how fucked up the world is? How did we let it get this way? Is there anything we can do to make it any better?"

Seemingly, now, there isn't. Yet finishing his books, even at their darkest (and Infinite Jest ends on an episode so abysmally dark that, had Wallace started the book with it, I would've dropped it in tears) there was always some note of hope. Because of the way he wrote and arranged his work, and because he came with you as an author the entire way, the last impression was not of darkest endings.

Wallace made of his work major literature: grand and sprawling and seething with ambition, erudition and unapologetic intellect; of his life, ending with this personal yet exponentially reaching apocalypse, he made minor literature of the kind Anthony Burgess referenced in one of the quotes Wallace used as epigraphs to "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," the final story in the collection Girl With Curious Hair:

"As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse."

Which brings me, momentarily, back to the reason I'll have trouble sleeping tonight: I fear that when suicides kill themselves, it's not because they want to die, but because they want the rest of us to die.

And yet, the thing with feathers is knocking around, alone, in Pandora's box waiting to be let out.

One of the things Wallace wrote that I hadn't read before today is the commencement speech he gave at Kenyon University back in 2005. I urge you, when you have time, to read that transcription. If you don't have time right now, here's a little something that gives me hope:

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

I never thought of that before, any of it. But it's true. The portion I've emphasized is the thought that resonates with me most; through realizing its truth, I know the truth of the rest.

David Foster Wallace is dead, and I can't respect him for what he did.

I'm still alive, and I can't help but love David Foster Wallace for all he's done.