“You know he said the purpose of fiction was to combat loneliness”
“That’s good, I never heard that”
“On the other hand spending most of your time with an 1100 page book tends to put a dent in your social life”
“Yeah, loneliness simultaneously increased and decreased”
“
It’s the mornings after the spider-and-heights dreams that are the most painful, that it sometimes takes three coffees and two showerd and sometimes a run to loosen the grip on his soul’s throat; and those post-dream mornings are even worse when he wakes unalone, if the previous night’s Subject is still there, wanting to twitter, or cuddle, or like spoon, asking what exactly is the story with the foggy invertered tumblers on the bathroom floor…even when alone, able to uncurl alone and slowly up and wring out the sheet and go to the bathroom, these darkest mornings start days that Orin can’t even bring himself for hours to think about how he’ll get through the day. The worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light-the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again off something tall and sheer
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Today is the sort of day that cannot be traversed, and must be climbed, vertically
The guy who wrote the foreword to Infinite Jest is super enthusiastic
My 1100 page book arrived, see ya next winter.
I’d never heard of Infinite Jest, but it’s a 1100 page book that [according to an Amazon reviewer] no one can read without a dictionary and it makes one of the characters in [the great film] Liberal Arts want to kill himself a wee bit more.
Challenge accepted!
