R.I.P.

Oh my God David Foster Wallace died? I didn't know. Where have I been for two days? I love him. I am so sad. If you haven't read him, you should. Start with "Consider the Lobster," because everyone likes that.

From Newsweek:
When the news came that David Foster Wallace, only 46 years old, had hanged himself in his home in California, I opened his masterpiece, the 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," at random and happened to land on a scene in which a recovering drug addict recalls a childhood moment of existential dread. "It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever confronted . . . I understood on an intuitive level why people kill themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling, I'd surely kill myself." We'll surely be spotting more and more of these clues in his work: some writers-Hemingway was one-seem to take years composing their suicide notes right under our very noses.

It will take a while for all these apparent "clues" in Wallace's work to stop pulsing like neon signs when we stumble on them. But that work will outlast the garish particulars of his death. In years to come, no one will be able to dismiss it as the symptomatic productions of a depressive head case: the dread to which he gave artistic shape is too real, too universal. True, Wallace was a head case, but in the sense that we're all head cases: encased in our skulls, and sealed off from our fellow humans, we have worlds upon worlds of teeming, unruly sensations, emotions, attitudes, opinions and-that chillingly neutral word-information. "What goes on inside," Wallace wrote in "Good Old Neon," is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at a given instant."

Added: You know what bothers me? Not so much the suicide, even though that does bother me because I'm not sure if I believe that you should be able to choose the time of your death, but that his wife found him. I don't think anyone else lives with them, so he had to know that his wife would walk in, and he would be hanging there. That seems totally selfishly thoughtless at best, maybe even cruel. So, that is worrisome and bothersome to me that such a great mind behaved this way. Anyway.