Sept. 12 will be the first anniversary of the death of David Foster Wallace.
Wallace, who hanged himself last year at the age of 46 after a decades-long battle with depression, is generally considered to be among the most influential writers in recent memory. His essays covered a diverse range of topics - from the AVN Awards to the Maine Lobster Festival - and his fiction often dealt with finding meaning and authenticity in a world saturated with advertising, irony and loneliness.
One of his trademarks, if it can be called that, was his voluminous output. His essays' word counts often ran into the thousands - and that doesn't include the text in the dozens of footnotes Wallace would deploy throughout much of his writing. The novel for which he is best known, "Infinite Jest," is a sprawling, three-pound colossus of 1,079 pages (including 388 endnotes).
And that makes Wallace seem like an anachronism in today's world - though an appreciated and necessary anachronism.
This is, after all, a time when the primary means of keeping in touch for many people involves answering the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or fewer. Phone conversations are perfunctory and brief, reduced to short, two-minute powwow sessions while you're on the bus - that is, if you don't just send a text message and call it done. Print journalists are told to trim copy down, to simplify their reporting rather than contextualize, and to make sure there's a cute, snappy lede - all so that some guy on the Internet can leave a terse "TL;DR" comment on the online version of the article.
It's chic in an elitist sort of way to look at all this and say that Twitter is dumbing down our culture, or that we're becoming a society of illiterates. But I don't think that's true - we're not becoming less intelligent, but I do think we're becoming less patient when it comes to self-expression, both our own and others'. And that's one of the worst byproducts of our instant gratification culture.
It's true that Wallace asked his readers for a lot of their time. All his footnotes and occasional logorrhea, though, don't come across as literary masturbation but rather as an earnest, almost desperate attempt to share very complicated ideas and emotions with whoever might need them. And, as it turns out, plenty of people did - in the wake of Wallace's suicide, some of the most poignant tributes to Wallace came from people who said his writing helped them feel less alone as they struggled with their own thoughts of suicide, and they were utterly crushed when they learned that someone who helped them pull through couldn't do the same.
In a lot of ways, I feel out of place talking about this. I'm as guilty of being a part of our instant gratification culture as anybody else. In fact, when the popular InfiniteSummer.org online reading community got started in June as a sort of support system among thousands who had never actually finished the book, I gave up after Week 2.
But if nothing else, Wallace's writing has taught me one thing: Even in an era when time is so intensely commodified, taking more than a few moments to share something that's important to you is still an act of love. And it's an act of love that's matched only by listening when someone does share.
R.I.P., David Foster Wallace. You are loved.
Joe Dellosa is an advertising senior.
