Infinite Jest, DFW Okay, but seriously, I love DFW as an essayist and for his short stories, and he is bleeding Pynchon everywhere, which is great, but I'm about 100 pages in and this better start going somewhere soon. He is definitely anti-quotable in this work so far.I am in here.
Some people say that you have to get past the first 200 pages or so before it really gets going. I've been meaning to post one of my favourite passages up here on Hubski, but it'd take a while to transcribe.
Here's one of my highlighted quotes from about halfway into the book: And another from near the end: Keep reading, iammyownrushmore. I know for me, it took a couple times to really get to know the book. But now I've reread it a couple times, and the innumerable characters, the disjointed storylines, his colloquially prosaic writing style, it all comes together.It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté.
It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.
Totally. Whenever I hear people talk about DFW and they get caught up on his little juxtaposed, obtuse wordage, I think they're really missing the forest for the trees. I'm definitely gonna keep at it, don't worry. But probably not more than once.his colloquially prosaic writing style
I don't want to turn this whole post into DFW wall, and I'm realizing now that the last time we did this, I posted another DFW quote from this very story (its my favorite, you see), so I'll just add onto your post. Good Old NeonAll right, now we’re coming to what I promised and led you through the whole dull synopsis of what led up to this in hopes of. Meaning what it’s like to die, what happens. Right? This is what everyone wants to know. And you do, trust me. Whether you decide to go through with it or not, whether I somehow talk you out of it the way you think I’m going to try to do or not. It’s not what anyone thinks, for one thing. The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let any- one know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.