I love David Foster Wallace because he suffered for us, and suffering created a universe of thought and feeling we might enter when we want to find our deepest thoughts and feelings concisely expressed.

He spoke for us, saying pretty much everything there is to say, and no one’s going to say it better for the rest of our lives. What more could one ask of a writer? That’s why his suicide makes me sad even now, many years later. The Infinite Jest in Infinite Jest is a video that’s so good, so enthralling, it kills whoever watches it. It is the ultimate entertainment in a book about entertainment and drug addiction, which is of course only another entertainment. Or should I say distraction, because all entertainments are essentially distractions.

And what are we distracting ourselves from? Is there something we should be afraid to pay too much attention to? It can’t be death, because our genes have convinced us that if we’re going to die, it’s going to be at a time very distant from now. Then it must be the present itself. But if I take this present, there’s nothing vexing or frightening about it. Nothing at all, really. Maybe it’s the directionlessness, the way things appear and then go away, never adding up to anything other than the continuation of what preceded them. Maybe that’s what T. S. Eliot meant by: “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Perhaps our bodies are better designed for this post-modern living than our souls. Ingenuity has bequeathed the species too much time for the soul to assimilate—grubbing for roots, hunting for dinner—both irrelevant in the affluent West for some time.