Skip to main content

2. A Death in the Family

Support Provided By
dfw1.jpg

The recently late David Foster Wallace said to students graduating from Kenyon College in 2005, "[I]t is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head.." Right after that he said some things retrospectively painful about suicide... tragic irony is the water we are born to live in... or (in other words not his) the inability to imagine yourself not dead, which point comes to a lot of us. And for some at that point, the imagination will not be revived... not “cannot” but “will not” (I choose carefully, but with my eyes closed)... which can be followed by all the perfectly ordinary and mechanical details of managing to die, pretty much like fixing a crappy lawnmower or wiring an electrical outlet, with straightforward stuff that has to be done in a certain way and with tools to achieve the result that the engine turns over, the blades cut, the kid’s computer turns on without sparks or the smell of burning plastic. But this specific failure of the imagination and the efficiencies that followed are for Wallace’s wife and his family. I had wanted to talk about the queasy uncertainty of L.A. Septembers, not grief and not someone else’s. But I was overtaken by events walking home from the office. Wallace’s worry over the allure of the interior monologue led to a longer than usual wait before I crossed South Street (mid-block, but I look both ways.) “Imperially alone” made him anxious, makes me anxious, and I stopped to let the traffic thin to nothing, listening only, the blurred disks of headlights right and left at the extreme ends of the street. Empty, but anticipatory. Solitude is like that, but it’s not being “imperially alone.”

Wallace went on talking to the students in 2005, making main points about the imagination and what he called worship. (However, see the 20th century for what the imagination and worship have done together. Both are in need of schooling; Wallace emphasized this.) Some examples of the ameliorating imagination were given the graduating students, replacements for the supermarket-check-out-line-DMV-office- dead-eyed-stare that makes the day-in-day-out of living appear so insufferable. (Except it is. It is sufferable.) They were a novelist’s substitutions that... and this is hard... that mistakenly inflated apparently insufferable ordinariness by imagining that it is either pitiable or therapeutic. (Middle-class sentiment has come to this.) Pitiable or therapeutic rather than beautiful and terrible, more Jonathan Franzen than William Blake. But Wallace was right about paying attention to what is right in front of you, only it’s not a question of paying attention the way a novelist pays attention. Then again, I don’t write novels.

I’ve reached my front door. It’s dark. And the conversation has turned morose. There’s been a death in the family. That explains it.

Photo credit: Keith Bedford; Getty Images

Support Provided By
Read More
Gray industrial towers and stacks rise up from behind the pitched roofs of warehouse buildings against a gray-blue sky, with a row of yellow-gold barrels with black lids lined up in the foreground to the right of a portable toilet.

California Isn't on Track To Meet Its Climate Change Mandates. It's Not Even Close.

According to the annual California Green Innovation Index released by Next 10 last week, California is off track from meeting its climate goals for the year 2030, as well as reaching carbon neutrality by 2045.
A row of cows stands in individual cages along a line of light-colored enclosures, placed along a dirt path under a blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds.

A Battle Is Underway Over California’s Lucrative Dairy Biogas Market

California is considering changes to a program that has incentivized dairy biogas, to transform methane emissions into a source of natural gas. Neighbors are pushing for an end to the subsidies because of its impact on air quality and possible water pollution.
A Black woman with long, black brains wears a black Chicago Bulls windbreaker jacket with red and white stripes as she stands at the top of a short staircase in a housing complex and rests her left hand on the metal railing. She smiles slightly while looking directly at the camera.

Los Angeles County Is Testing AI's Ability To Prevent Homelessness

In order to prevent people from becoming homeless before it happens, Los Angeles County officials are using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to predict who in the county is most likely to lose their housing. They would then step in to help those people with their rent, utility bills, car payments and more so they don't become unhoused.