BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN

David Foster Wallace, 1999

IDEA | BOOK

David Foster Wallace saves lives, shapes them, guides them in particular directions, directions more profound than one considers possible for their own ego.

As a newly lost college graduate, heading into a dark aimless Winter, this book offered a sense of hope. Not through encouragement, but through observed moments, people, abstractions, jokes, raw truth.

Adulthood observed under a microscope.

Sometimes, with art, a dividing line is sensed between work perceived as intellectual and work perceived as not. As young Beings, we’re exposed to certain ideas, music, literature, films that lie just beyond our comprehension. And these inaccessible pieces of art can form desires in our mind, a curiosity and craving to understand, become a part of, get the meaning behind.

We cannot force ourselves across the dividing line. Art has to come to us. And we can only know when we’re ready to receive the information when we find ourselves watching that film, reading that book, listening to that album, and resonating with it. We cannot predict when we’ll find our destined way into an idea, when life will lead us there, toward an understanding in the form of a connection. What we can do, however, is cultivate a fluid sense of opinion, a kind of openness that will perhaps allow us to resonate with more art more often.

Serious films. Serious literature. Serious things don’t really exist. And all it takes to shatter the glass is an opened page of a book or a press of play. For who knows, maybe within that first sentence you will find yourself laughing at something you never found funny before, or moved by a topic which, until that moment, you had never felt any sort of relation to.

A subtle level of observation. Humour between the lines and in the micro-specific images painted. No punchlines. Just funny in the form of acutely absurd and beautifully haunting truths.

Art is truth. Revisit it and revisit it.

Extracted Story | A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

Author Reading | Suicide as a Sort of Present

Passage | Church Not Made With Hands

Music discloses itself as a relation between one key and two notes locked by the key in dance. Rhythm. And in Day’s blown predreams, too, music consumes all law: what is most solid discloses itself here as rhythms, nothing but. Rhythms are relations between what you believe and what you believed before.

Publishers

First published in the United States of America by Little Brown and Company US in 1999, and in Great Britain by Abacus in 2000.

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was a shining light who expressed invisible truth through an emotional intelligence and mastery of language that will forever seem wizard-like.