The Burden of Genius

The last time I chose a best friend was when I was in Grade 3. I remember declaring it, maybe in my head, maybe out loud to whoever would listen. His name was Ian MacDonald and we played soccer together and I thought it was funny to ask him if he wanted a hamburger cause his last name was MacDonald. He didn't find it funny but we had a lot of sleepovers anyway. I'm not sure why I chose him as my best friend, but I know I adhered to my choice religiously.

Who knows why but as a kid, there is an excitement to choosing favourites, favourite movies (Lion King) or teams (Edmonton Oilers) or foods (Eggplant mush that my Dad used to make). But as I've gotten older, I rarely choose favorites anymore. Maybe because as an adult you have to justify your choices and because this world is too full of great things to decide which one you like best. I can't justify my choices with the simple platitudes that pass unquestioned when you're a kid (I like the Lion King cause of Timon and Pumba!). Well you can but who would care. But after the two months that it took me to finish reading the 1,100 pages of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and definitely after I read it a second and a third time, I was sure that it was my favourite work of fiction, by a long shot. I didn't declare it out loud and tell all my friends (or maybe I did, Dayna?) but I knew.

So I was stunned when I heard from my sister that David Foster Wallace, at age 46, had committed suicide this past weekend. Genius is not a word that applies as often as it is used. I call my friend a genius for wearing snowboots and snowpants to university when it snows (we used to walk to school) when in fact, it's just logical and a little eccentric. But DFW was a genius.

If you don't know, I can't tell you. But I'll try. If you have time, click the links at the bottom of the post.

After finishing Infinite Jest, I craved more. I started reading everything else he had written and the breadth of the topics seemed too much for one man to handle without resorting to a superficial assessment. His essays tackled everything, from the horrors of a cruise ship (see link below) to America and the proliferation of talk radio, to tennis as a religious experience and it was all from an unbelievably original and inspiring point of view. Says Thom Bissell, "He had the ability to make intellectual things sound plainspoken and scatological things sound beautiful and horrible things sound honest."

He covered tired topics like John McCain, animal rights and 9/11 and still came away with new discoveries and realizations about society, human psyche, politics. He would take the issue and look at it from a satellite and then with a microscope. Then he would examine the popular perspective in the same way. And somehow, he would tease out these brilliant, universal conclusions. It seemed he was always five steps ahead. And he wrote with such blistering honesty, clarity and grace, with a grandfatherly decency, that even when he wrote about the discomfort of attending the annual porn star convention in Las Vegas with a confusing mix of disgust and arousal, reading it aloud to your parents would be enlightening and enjoyable, not awkward.

And the book, Infinite Jest. How do I even begin to describe it? While I was reading Infinite Jest, every few pages I had to stop and just smile because it was too much joy to handle. It's a difficult read and I had to stop to let it sink in because it was too much insight, too much wisdom for me to handle. His writing is not for those without patience because he will keep writing and writing until he is absolutely sure that he has made himself understood. He finds irony in the most curious of places, his definitions are beautifully accurate, his descriptions load your senses and take you places that are sometimes dark. He makes you feel at home in your most anxious, neurotic and self-conscious state. When you read his words, they map your thoughts, his word transcend the page, and transplant his ideas straight from his brain into yours. And this makes you feel unalone.

Like other geniuses, he had an ability to see things differently, maybe because he noticed all the things that most of us filter out on a daily basis to keep us from going insane. And maybe that's why, like other geniuses (Hemingway, Cobain, Van Gogh) he killed himself.

For the rest of us, it seems that the ability to create such staggering beauty would be reason enough to live on. But what non-suicidal mind knows how to understand suicides. Obviously, that wasn't enough or for him, it wasn't about beauty. Maybe he was a genius because it wasn't enough. In Infinite Jest, DFW describes the case of one girl in a mental house who has tried to commit suicide. She describes her depression as being entombed in a sense of nothingness, no emotion, just the pain of an infinite numbness. His short story 'The Depressed Person' begins, "The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror." He had dealt with depression his whole life. Who is to say he made the wrong choice?

Was he thinking before he hung himself “What’s the point?” Despite all the answers we could come up with that would end in exclamation (Wait! What about life! Puppies!! Mountains!! Love!!! God?!!?!!), I'm sure for him they would still be unsatisfactory.

I emulate him in my writing. This post runs on and on because I have DFW's fear of not being perfectly understood. I have learned from him to write with honesty and to examine things that I would normally ignore, and to step back from things that I scrutinize too closely. I try like him to be profound without being cheesy but with this next sentence, I fail. He has changed the way I see the world, the way I write and read, and the way I live my life.

Transcript of DFW's Kenyon Commencement address to 2005 undergrads

Literary communities' memories of DFW

Collection of Essays DFW wrote for Harper's Magazine
(His essay 'Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise' is acclaimed and hilarious but long and hard to read on a computer)