[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest
God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.[/b]
You know, if He exists.
Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really.
Bingo: 09/11.
Then: What would you do?
I am not what you see and hear.
Especially now of course.
…morning is the soul’s night.
What does that tell you? Providing it’s true of course.
You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing comes to mind.
Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
Actually, of any generation, right?