Oblivion - David Foster Wallace
“What goes on inside is just too
fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch
the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”
“The truth is you already know what it's like. You already
know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes
through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know.
As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything
in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get
out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see
under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other
through these tiny keyholes.
But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the
way you think...The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's
like. That it's what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless
inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the
infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud,
the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course
what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you
try to manage what part they see if you know it's only a part. Who wouldn't?
It's called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it's why it feels so good
to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or
chant in Bengali--it's not English anymore, it's not getting squeezed through
any hole.
So cry all you want, I won't tell anybody.”
“The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity. The
suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity
fascinating was that they were not, themselves, celebrities. That wasn't quite
it. (....) It was more the deeper, more tragic and universal conflict of which
the celebrity paradox was a part. The conflict between the subjective
centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective
insignificance. Atwater knew - as did everyone at Style, though by some strange
unspoken consensus it was never said aloud - that this was the single great
informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It
was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture. It was everywhere, at the root
of everything - of impatience in long lines, of cheating on taxes, of movements
in fashion and music and art, of marketing. In particular, he thought it was
alive in the paradoxes of audience. It was the feeling that celebrities were
your intimate friends, coupled with the inchoate awareness that that untold
millions of people felt the same way - and that the celebrities themselves did
not. Atwater had had contact with a certain number of celebrities (there was no
way to avoid it at BSG), and they were not, in his experience, very friendly or
considerate people. Which made sense when one considered that celebrities were
not actually functioning as real people at all, but as something more like
symbols of themselves.”
“If I understand you right,' he says, 'you're saying that
you're basically a calculating manipulative person who always says what you
think will get somebody to approve of you or form some impression of you you
think you want.' I told him that was maybe a little simplistic but basically
accurate, and he said further that as he understood it I was saying that I felt
as if I was trapped in this false way of being and unable ever to be really
open and tell the truth irregardless of whether it'd make me look good in
others' eyes or not. And I somewhat resignedly said yes, and that I seemed
always to have had this fraudulent, calculating part of my brain firing way all
the time, as if I were constantly playing chess with everybody and figuring out
that if I wanted them to move a certain way I had to move in such a way as to
induce them to move that way. He asked if I ever played chess, and I told him I
used to in middle school but quit because I couldn't be as good as I eventually
wanted to be, how frustrating it was to get just good enough to know what getting
really good at it would be like but not being able to get that good, etc.”
“I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn't see
myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud.”
“(..)-Dr. G. would later say that the whole "my whole
life flashed before me" phenomenon at the end is more like being a
whitecap on the surface of the ocean, meaning that it's only at the moment you
subside and start sliding back in that you're really even aware there's an
ocean at all. When you're up and out there as a whitecap you might talk and act
as if you know you're just a whitecap on the ocean, but deep down you don't
think there's really an ocean at all. It's almost impossible to. Or like a leaf
that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of, etc. There are all sorts of ways
to try to express it.”
“Atwater knew — as did everyone at Style, though by some
strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud — that this was the single
great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of
insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture.”
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