Archive of September 2008
David Foster Wallace, Suicide at 46
Whenever someone dies by violence, the natural reactions are sadness for the victim, and anger at the killer. Which necessarily kind of short-circuits with suicides, because both are the same person.
When Kurt Cobain took himself out, I first got the news via phone call from a friend. Tonight, it was my sister who called with the news about Wallace. Now I’m sitting here reading and re-reading blog posts and obits, which all seem incredibly short and blunt.
I can’t really think of an artist in any form or medium that has meant more to me, and only a few that are maybe on par. Of course, you could tell from the work that the guy understood sick puppies a little too well to be anything but a very sick puppy himself, but there was also always a kind of sense of victory there — like this was a guy who had wrestled with some pretty serious demons, but you got a feeling that he’d gotten past that, made some kind of peace with them and with himself, and was the stronger for having lived through the struggle. I mean, given the amount of misery and depression and yes even suicide depicted in his work, there’s a bit of a should-have-seen-it-coming thing, but not really, because there was always that note of existential hope he seemed to communicate. This is going to affect the writing that remains, make it seem so much bleaker and more hopeless.
Goddamn. That poor bastard.
Update — a couple links that are saving me from just reading the AP obit on different servers:
DFW’s Kenyon College 2005 Commencement speech has some now-eerie remarks on suicide, and makes you wish he’d listened to it himself, like, yesterday afternoon.
McSweeney’s has a very touching tribute up, which I’m posting here as a screenshot because presumably it won’t stay like that forever.
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