Mindfulness

The Pale King - David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company, 2011)

Talking about DFW is something I do quite a bit, but that I find intensely difficult. (And I'm far from the end of the bell curve of his most devoted fans.) So I'm gonna skip all a whole bunch and go straight to an attempt to make some sort of sense for myself of this unfinished work.

I found myself wondering how long this novel would have been if finished. There's so much... it stands up well as it is, but then I think about Infinite Jest, and I start to think that maybe these 538 are really only about half. And that's.... well, it is. We can leave it there.

What DFW had in mind only really became clear at the end, in the notes, where I was like: ohhhhhh, so that's why everyone was so ... what's the word? They were all gifted. But these quirks all seemed to make sense in middle of the mind-numbing bureaucracy of an IRS building in the middle of a Midwestern field in the middle of the 1980s. It's as much about being present, and paying attention, and breaking through that wall. Thus.... a big long list.

• "It was true: The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not." (Esp, in the case of the character thinking this, when you are inundated with extraneous information.)
• This unbelievable passage, too long to quote in full here, about the power of interrupting a conversation and asking "what's wrong?" which will shock the other person into wondering how you know. "He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. ... He doesn't know everybody's always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they're exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing's ever wrong, from seeing it."
• §13 is a really quality depiction of the thought process in panic attacks, and the way anxiety about having anxiety becomes the central source of the anxiety.
• This is (naturally) a footnote: "There are secrets within secrets, though--always."
• The 100-page mega-chapter has several thought-provoking moments, although it becomes funny when you realize later one what its function is.
• A callback here to that first quote I mention: "It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, the fact that it's a choice." Different speaker, same idea.
• Oh, and that guy's mom becomes a lesbian in the mid1970s and opens a feminist bookstore called Speculum Books. I loved this.
• Advice often merely points out "the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of [the advisee's] own situation and path."
• Wallace, as a character: "What renders a truth meaningful, worthwhile, & c. is its relevance, which in turn requires extraordinary discernment and sensitivity to context, questions of value, and overall point - otherwise we might as well just be computers downloading raw data to one another."
• Back on the point of paying attention, there's another lovely long passage (by the DFW character) about concentration and studying and how most paying attention is done in "jagged little fits and starts" and is mostly all the things we do to distract ourselves.
• Oh, and then we get to the uncomfortably true observations about the banality of certain immaturities... that no one truly understands and loves you for who you are and "you're also aware that your loneliness is stupid and banal even while you're feeling it, the loneliness, so you don't even have any sympathy for yourself."

And this doesn't even get at how interested and funny and annoying and actually quite tragic most of the characters are. At how fascinating and extraordinarily rich and DFWian. This book is a treasure, partially formed. And that, unfortunately, has to be enough.

It's a choice, mindfulness. It's a choice what we pay attention to. And everything about David Foster Wallace makes me want to remember that. And to make choices that I find satisfying. It's so difficult; it's unbelievably and maddeningly difficult. But still worth the trying.