Quotes: David Foster
Wallace- from Infinite Jest
The
Ego
“Everybody is identical in their
secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone
else.”
“You will become way less concerned with what
other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
“But someone sometime let you forget
how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing
of importance, choosing. . . How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if
there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to
choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?”
“We all have our little solipsistic
delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in
the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher,
who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that
only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication
into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless
sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the
frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the
panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That
only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us
together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on
what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”
“We are all dying to give our lives
away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or
philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away,
utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about
it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what?
These rooms, blandly filled with excrement and heat? To what purpose?”
It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human
life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as
a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning
that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of
the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich
and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and
antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates
around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost
mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means
painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert
describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double
bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency —
sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or
dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.
“life's endless war against the self
you cannot live without.”
Choose your attachments carefully.
Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.
That the people to be the most frightened of are the people
who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let
yourself appear weak. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself
unendurable.
That other people can often see things about you that you
yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. That having a lot of
money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance
sober is a whole different kettle of fish.
That different people have radically
different ideas of basic personal hygiene.
That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have
it. That if you do something nice for
somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know
it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form
trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating
buzz. That anonymous generosity, too,
can be abused. That it is permissible to
want. That everybody is identical in
their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
That this isn’t necessarily perverse.
That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well
be angels.”
“This wise old whiskery fish swims
up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims
away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and
go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away.”
“Try to let what is unfair teach
you…what is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher…you can be shaped, or
you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable.
Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard.”
“That it takes great personal
courage to let yourself appear weak.”
“And then also, again, still, what
are those boundaries, if they’re not baselines, that contain and direct its
infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful
and infinitely dense? The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player
himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought,
brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other
side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is
the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion.
Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your
own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside
the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is
an essentially tragic enterprise… You seek to vanquish and transcend the
limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is
tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the
human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over
and over again…Mario thinks hard again. He’s trying to think of how to
articulate something like: But then is battling and vanquishing the self the
same as destroying yourself? Is that like saying life is pro-death? … And then
but so what’s the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the
game and its own end?”
“so full of himself he could have
shit limbs.”
Loneliness
“I think there must be probably
different types of suicides. I'm not one of the self-hating ones. The type of
like "I'm shit and the world'd be better off without poor me" type
that says that but also imagines what everybody'll say at their funeral. I've
met types like that on wards. Poor-me-I-hate-me-punish-me-come-to-my-funeral.
Then they show you a 20 X 25 glossy of their dead cat. It's all self-pity
bullshit. It's bullshit. I didn't have any special grudges. I didn't fail an
exam or get dumped by anybody. All these types. Hurt themselves. I didn't want
to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don't hate myself. I just wanted
out. I didn't want to play anymore is all. I wanted to just stop being
conscious. I'm a whole different type. I wanted to stop feeling this way. If I
could have just put myself in a really long coma I would have done that. Or
given myself shock I would have done that. Instead.”
“... That no single, individual
moment is in and of itself unendurable.”
...Hal, who’s empty but not dumb,
theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment
is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at
least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and
naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way
forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself
anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge
skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is
the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal
self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the
hip empty mask, anhedonia.”
“That having sex with someone you do
not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place,
afterward. That it is permissible to
want. That everybody is identical in
their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from
everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse. That there might not be angels, but there are
people who might as well be angels. That
God — unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts
entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God. That God might regard the issue of whether
you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things
s/he/it's interested in re you.”
“...loneliness is not a function of
solitude.”
“It's of some interest that the
lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as
hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of
Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that
most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older
people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study
it for clues on how to be cool, hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger
people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and
included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like
peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that
the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self.
Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to
fit, to be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to
inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony
at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever
it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from
gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this
continent.”
“Don’t cry, Booboo. Remember the
flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to
half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a
second. So listen - one way to lower the
flag to half mast is just to lower the flag. There’s another way though. You
can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original
height. You get me? You understand what I mean, Mario?”
“A U.S. of modern A. where the State
is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and
fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the
acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea
of personal happiness: The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?”
“One of the really American things
about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for”
Addiction
“--and then you're in serious
trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious
trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you
gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the
Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and
compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and
a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it's the Face In The Floor, the
grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own
face in the mirror, now, it's you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and
become you, and the puke-, drool- and Substance-crusted T-shirt you've both
worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the
root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its
exposed chest's center and centerless eyes is just a lightless hole, more
teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now
you see you've been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the
side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You
see now that It's your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble
It's gotten you into is undeniable and you still can't stop. Doing the
Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can't stop, even
though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished.
You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you
cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only
bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either
ends lives or turns them around.”
“If, by the virtue of charity or the
circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a
Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state-funded Ennet House,
you will acquire many exotic new facts [...] That certain persons simply will
not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians
have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on [...] That
sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be
abused [...] That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape.
That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and
shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise,
and meditation/prayer [...] That loneliness is not a function of solitude [...]
That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to
make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings
have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt [...] That there is such a thing
as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness [...] That the effects of too many cups
of coffee are in no way pleasant or intoxicating [...] That if you do something
nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it
for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or
form trying to get credit for it, it's almost its own form of intoxicating
buzz. That anonymous generosity, too,
can be abused [...] That it is permissible to want [...] That there might not be angels, but there are
people who might as well be angels.”
God
“...when he kneels at other times
and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual
understanding of God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing,
but Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the
sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with.”
“(She) says that she's finding it
especially hard to take when these earnest ravaged folks at the lectern say
they're `Here But For the Grace of God,' except that's not the strange thing
she says, because when Gately nods hard and starts to interject about `It was
the same for--' and wants to launch into a fairly standard Boston AA
agnostic-soothing riff about the `God' in the slogan being just shorthand for a
totally subjective and up-to-you `Higher Power' and AA being merely spiritual
instead of dogmatically religious, a sort of benign anarchy of subjective
spirit, Joelle cuts off his interjection and says that but that her trouble
with it is that `But For the Grace of God' is a subjunctive, a counterfactual,
she says, and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like
e.g. `But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin's bathroom
floor,' so that an indicative transposition like `I'm here But For the Grace of
God' is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it
or not it's meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks
can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a
Radarange at the thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass
where this is the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in.”
“Todd, trust math. As in Matics,
Math E. First-order predicate logic. Never fail you. Quantities and their
relation. Rates of change. The vital statistics of God or equivalent. When all
else fails. When the boulder's slid all the way back to the bottom. When the
headless are blaming. When you do not know your way about. You can fall back
and regroup around math. Whose truth is deductive truth. Independent of sense
or emotionality. The syllogism. The identity. Modus Tollens. Transitivity.
Heaven's theme song. The night light on life's dark wall, late at night.
Heaven's recipe book. The hydrogen spiral. The methane, ammonia, H2O. Nucleic
acids. A and G, T and C. The creeping inevibatility. Caius is mortal. Math is
not mortal. What it is is: listen: it's true.”
“[...] at this point the
God-understanding stuff kind of makes him want to puke, from fear. Something
you can't see or hear or touch or smell: OK. All right. But something you can't
even feel? Because that's what he feels when he tries to understand something
to really sincerely pray to. Nothingness. He says when he tries to pray he gets
this like image in his mind's eye of the brainwaves or whatever of his prayers
going out and out, with nothing to stop them, going, going, radiating out into
like space and outliving him and still going and never hitting Anything out
there, much less Something with an ear. Much much less Something with an ear
that could possibly give a rat's ass.”
Odds
and Ends
“Try to learn to let what is unfair
teach you.”
“It did what all ads are supposed to
do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
“It's weird to feel like you miss
someone you're not even sure you know.”
“What metro Boston AAs are trite but
correct about is that both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an
individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful
events in their life: i.e almost nothing important that ever happens to you
happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans
trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even
hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried
to engineer.” ―
“That sometimes human beings have to
just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned
with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That
there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is
possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on
anything is very hard work.”
“What if sometimes there is no
choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you
just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are
lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?”
“Please learn the pragmatics of
expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.”
“The boy, who did everything well
and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and
whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the
son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more
hidden boy, toward the wraith's life's end; and no one else in the wraith and
the boy's nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the
graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing, right before their eyes. They
looked but did not see his invisibility.”
I believe the only real monsters
might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.”
“...the sun would leave my sky if I
couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.”
maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time
(Prettiest G.O.A.T.),
“Their handshake looked, for the
first split-second he looked, like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was
going Sieg Heil.”
“He says I was around five and
crying and was vividly red in the cold spring air. I was saying something over
and over; he couldn’t make it out until our mother saw me and shut down the
tiller, ears ringing, and came over to see what I was holding out. This turned
out to have been a large patch of mold—Orin posits from some dark corner of the
Weston home’s basement, which was warm from the furnace and flooded every
spring. The patch itself he describes as horrific: darkly green, glossy,
vaguely hirsute, speckled with parasitic fungal points of yellow, orange, red.
Worse, they could see that the patch looked oddly incomplete, gnawed-on; and
some of the nauseous stuff was smeared around my open mouth. ‘I ate this,”
“I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I
was (long ago) abroad in the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale
and educated and talented and functional and white, patient and loving and
supportive and concerned and involved in their children’s lives, profilgate
with compliments and diplomatic with constructive criticism, loquacious in
their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval of their children,
conforming to every last jot-tittle in any conceivably definition of a good
parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a)
emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically
depressed or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic
self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously
psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a) … (g).
Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent
on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce
children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who
just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents
love them even though they are hideous?
Is it a sign of abuse if a mother produces a child who
believes not that he is innately beautiful and lovable and deserving of
magnificent maternal treatment but somehow that he is a hideous unlovable child
who has somehow lucked in to having a really magnificent mother? Probably not.
But could such a mother then really be all that magnificent,
if that’s the child’s view of himself?
“somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings -
as in the historical Beatles's McCartney - taken and run it through a Kurtzweil
remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs.
Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine....
Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just
fucking could not sing, and having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from
the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo
was to Gately unspeakably depressing - her voice sounding so lost, trying to
hide and bury itself inside the pro backups' voices; Gately imagined Mrs. Linda
McCartney - in his Staff room's wall's picture a kind of craggy-face blonde -
imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband's pro noise, feeling
low esteem and whispering off-key, not knowing quite when to shake her tambourine:
C's depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic-seeming, like
drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom.”
