Look at me! I’m reading Infinite Jest.
There are a few pitfalls in what I’m about to do. First, it doesn’t help my status or popularity to write a literary post on a Friday night. Second, writing about something you read can often come off as pretentious. That is especially true when A) you point it out as I’ve just done, and B) what you are reading is Infinite Jest, a book that the pretentious use as a metaphorical, and possibly literal, footstool in social sparring. And third, I’m really just quoting the book, which eliminates almost all original thought from this whole piece, and just kind of makes me look like a child making-believe that I’m an adult. With that being said, I hope you find some of these selections as interesting, and weird, and funny, and relatable as I do.
To provide a little context, David Foster Wallace’s book focuses on a tennis academy, a substance-recovery halfway-house, wheelchair assassins, entertainment, relationships, and a gargantuan number of other things. So far, it’s pretty amazing. At one point, as the narrator, David Foster Wallace goes on for six pages about the new facts you will acquire after spending a little time at a halfway house. These are some of my favorites:
That,
no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.
sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and, can with sustained effort, be abused.
purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape.
gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer…
you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it.
loneliness is not a function of solitude.
a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read
logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.
females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.
certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do.
it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person.
sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.
you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
most substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.
is is simply more pleasant to be happy that to be pissed off.
99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves;
99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good.
99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.
it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
pretty much everybody masturbates. Rather a lot, it turns out.
other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.
having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.
trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish.
certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.
cockroaches can, up to a certain point, be lived with.
‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene.
perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.
having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.
it is permissible to want.
there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.
God- unless you’re Chalrton Heston, or unhinged, or both- speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.
God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in re you.
everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.
there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
