I recently found this introduction David Foster Wallace wrote for The Best American Essays 2007 and, like all his stuff, he manages to cover so much ground in one piece, and follow a line of thought further than most. It's also really interesting to me because I've also recently stumbled on some retroactive critiques of DFW that deride his fiction for lacking faith in character and story-telling, or--in really odd, severe criticism--lacking heart. Which is really weird to me. It makes me wonder if they've really read the man, or if they just rely on what certain Deciders have said about him. If you've read Infinite Jest and don't find little Mario Incandenza to be the most amazingly compassionate character whose story is moving, deeply sad, and hilarious, I think you might need to get your heart and soul checked out. And Mario's just one of dozens of characters in the book.
It's nearly impossible to look at his writing now without seeing it through the lens of his 2008 suicide, an event as powerful as a black hole pulling in almost everything he accomplished in life. So with that in mind, this introduction can seem even more earnest, and maybe it is--it's hard to say for sure, but either way it's beside the point. In this piece, there's so much compassion for the modern, every minute struggle of turning all the information that gets thrown at us into usable, practical knowledge. His writing shows that he was living that struggle, just like everyone else, without ever talking down to us or seeming to push some self-interested agenda or pretense. This is incredibly difficult to do.
Here's a couple neat snippets:
"You can drown in dogmatism now, too—radio, Internet, cable, commercial and scholarly print—but this kind of drowning is more like sweet release. Whether hard right or new left or whatever, the seduction and mentality are the same. You don’t have to feel confused or inundated or ignorant. You don’t even have to think, for you already Know, and whatever you choose to learn confirms what you Know. This dogmatic lockstep is not the kind of inevitable dependence I’m talking about—or rather it’s only the most extreme and frightened form of that dependence." [This is just in a footnote, by the way]
"Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. That’s about as clearly as I can put it."
