Tag Archives: David Foster Wallace

Dullness

Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves [...]
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“I feel unalone”

It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art. David Foster Wallace On [...]
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Finite Summer

“It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.” Infinite Summer ended yesterday. I didn’t make it. But that doesn’t mean I’m finished. Photo and quote from here.
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Modern Survival

For at least 10 years before his death, Wallace was working on a long novel that he called The Pale King. Set in a branch of the US Internal Revenue Service, it aimed to articulate the hard-won thesis of mindfulness that Wallace had come to after years of depression and treatment: “Bliss—a second-by-second joy and [...]
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Tourism

Over the next few days/weeks, it’s possible I’ll be including here little stories or anecdotes about my time in Rome. I’d prefer not to write out some lengthy spiel about the experience, because I’d probably forget a lot of it and it would likely just end up being some boring ramble. In lieu of that, [...]
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Default

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default [...]
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