X-Post from LBN: R.I.P. David Foster Wallace

[InternalDialogue]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3487888

[DesertRat]

1. Such a terrible loss.

R.I.P. David Foster Wallace :cry:

[RetroLounge]

2. This sucks...

:cry:

RL

[Orrex]

3. I don't mean to seem petty or prying, but...

Do we know what kinds of issue might have been behind this? Sure, there's something to be said about the fear of a sophomore slump, but by all accounts he was widely admired, liked, and respected.

Or did he suffer from clinical depression? In that case, it's all the more tragic that this disease has claimed yet another life.

RIP, Professor Wallace.

[InternalDialogue]

4. I haven't seen anything yet as to motive or a message or note left behind.

I think he loved writing and thinking for their own sakes (or at least writing as a mode of opening his mind up for others to investigate), a notion I latched onto when I saw that he had been tapped to write the "A Compact History of Infinity" for the Great Discoveries series. That book is way over my head mathematically, but he clearly jumped into it with both feet. I got the feeling that he'd never have undertaken a whopper like that if he were concerned about his fiction career.

[pitohui]

5. as far we know "no one knows"

at least w. disch we know the story -- no legal gay marriage in new york, a natural disaster (flood), diabetes -- too many disasters hitting at one time w. no one standing up to say we care tom and he had no way to pay the bills so he picked up a gun

as yet no one is admitted that wallace had any reason to feel isolated, the thinking is it is totally the disease of depression ate his brain

[DesertRat]

6. His father said that he was suffering from serious depression

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst.

In response to a question about what being an American was like for him at the end of the 20th century, he told the online magazine Salon in 1996 that there was something sad about it, but not as a reaction to the news or current events. “It’s more like a stomach-level sadness,” he said. “I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.”

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15wallace.html?ref=books

[pitohui]

7. OMG what terrible news

we never stop and think what happens when the medicines stop working, do we?

i had no idea that he was so ill and had suffered so terribly

[InternalDialogue]

8. It's interesting that Salon article you mention is from 1996.

That's when I first heard of Wallace, via a clipping sent to me by a friend in Chicago. It was an author profile written right after Infinite Jest began catching on in a big way.

Coincidentally, this morning I was sorting through old office papers and personal letters and came across that 1996 clipping. I wouldn't have remembered it at all but for the fact that I had chosen to start that chore yesterday.

The original article is archived at the Tribune and available for a price, but the author of that 1996 piece kindly reposted it in his blog Sunday.

The novel's melancholy tone grew out of observations Wallace was making as he looked outward and inward. "It seemed to me that there was something sort of sad about the country . . . that at a time when our lives are more comfortable and more full probably of pleasure, sheer pleasure, than any other time in history, that people were essentially miserable," he said.

...

"I went through a real bad three years," he said of the late '80s/early '90s, when he lived in Boston (enrolling briefly in Harvard University's Ph.D. program in philosophy) and Syracuse. He even once checked himself into a hospital to be put on a suicide watch.

"In a weird way it seemed like there was something very American about what was going on, that things were getting better and better for me in terms of all the stuff I thought I wanted, and I was getting unhappier and unhappier," he said.

The profile hints at (or, in many cases, overtly describes) all sorts of depression symptoms and observations that Wallace experienced. But it's obvious from his life that he didn't ignore them and in fact actively fought them.

What strikes me most is his comment about being extremely unhappy at a time when his life was growing increasingly better or more successful. In fact, for the entire country, we were on a roll. It was the start of the dot-com explosion, the national mood was high, and yet he still sensed a materialistic malaise -- both in himself and in the country as a whole.

Take that outlook at a time when things in general were extremely positive and switch out the "extremely positive" part with "unbearably disastrous." It's one thing when a country is suffering and acts like it -- look at the masterpieces produced by Dostoevsky -- but America wants to ignore those warning signs, and the denial creates a wholly unhealthy climate. Just as with an individual depressive or suicide, that willful ignorance in a citizenry is an invitation to death and despair. Instead of observing our society and undertaking a healthy scaling back of our consumption, expectations, bravado and attitude at the same time we express our depression and discontent through productive artistic avenues, we pretend everything is fine -- or going to be fine, without any effort on our own parts -- and we unconsciously absorb the disappointment and burden of responsibility for change without a rational system for adequately processing it. We basically make ourselves vessels for unmeasured sadness when we should be checking ourselves into a hospital.