Imagine walking into a place, say a mega-chain copy shop in a strip
mall. It's early morning, and you're the first customer. You stop under
the bright fluorescents and let the doors glide closed behind you, look
at the employees in their corporate-blue shirts, mouths open, shuffling
around sleepily. You take them in as a unified image, with an
impenetrable surface of vague boredom and dissatisfaction that you're
content to be on the outside of, and you set to your task, to your
copying or whatever. That's precisely the moment when Wallace hits
pause, that first little turn into inattention, into self-absorption. He
reverses back through it, presses play again. Now it's different.
You're in a room with a bunch of human beings. Each of them, like you,
is broken and has healed in some funny way. Each of them, even the
shallowest, has a novel inside. Each is loved by God or deserves to be.
They all have something to do with you: When you let the membrane of
your consciousness become porous, permit osmosis, you know it to be
true, we have something to do with one another, are part of a
narrative—but what? Wallace needed very badly to know. And he sensed
that the modern world was bombarding us with scenarios, like the inside
of the copy shop, where it was easy to forget the question altogether.
We "feel lonely in a crowd," he writes in one of his stories, but we
"stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being," with the
result that "we are, always, faces in a crowd."
That's what I love in Wallace, noticed details like that,
microdescriptions of feeling states that seem suggestive of whole
branching social super-systems, sentences that make me feel like, Anyone who doesn't get that is living in a different world. He was the closest thing we had to a recording angel.
- JJS on DFW
descensus Averno facilis est