Blue Light Special

I've read most of Infinite Jest in the dark. At night after I put my son to bed, I lie down on the floor and read by the blue light of our night light. Then, I'll get up, leave the room and take the book with me so I can continue reading it. But I hardly ever do. I take it back to the bedroom and read it in bed - again by the blue light. Occasionally I've gone to sleep with the book on my pillow above my head. I have incurred no injury from this yet.

I'm sure years from now, I'll be able to recall these exact circumstances much the same way I remember reading Crime and Punishment in the humid, Louisville summer lying on my couch and, in particular, the time I fell asleep only to be woken up by a six-inch cockroach crawling across my face. These physical circumstances always seem to adhere to my memory and form my attachment and perspective on what I'm reading. By now, reading IJ in the dark with the blue light on is the SOP and integral to the experience. It is the experience. It's reading. Reading.

One of the things I find myself doing now, 300 some pages in, is being more conscious of the connections I'm trying to make and asking myself why I'm doing that. Why not just read the book? Let the work speak for itself.

That said I wanted to share this:

...under all that froth, that energy wasted attacking confectionery ads, lies the true, hard core of Wallace's work: its engagement with depression, addiction and death. Infinite Jest contains the most accurate and moving descriptions of clinical depression in modern literature. Read now, the Kate Gompert chapters provide a mature, gentle explanation of Wallace's own death. And they forgive us, his wife, his parents, his friends: we weren't to blame. They are noble pages. As Thomas Pynchon has said: "When we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death." It is a tribute to modern America that this is so. Modern America beat fascism and it beat communism. Death is the last oppressor left standing in America.

The manner of Wallace's death has changed the meaning of his work. Pages that seemed self-indulgent now feel painfully earned. Scenes that were coal have become diamond. At the minimum this should shut up James Wood. Wood famously called Wallace (among others) a "hysterical realist."... "Hysterical" was always an appalling word to use, to deny the subjective reality of other writers, but today it reads like Patton slapping a shell-shocked soldier. Reading Infinite Jest now, it's not the same book. Each time I go back, it has grown new facets, like a crystal. I don't know how great a book it is, because it isn't finished yet.

David Foster Wallace lives.