Did I black out and write this without my own knowledge? Am I David Foster Wallace? His writing and thinking feel so familiar, his tone so exactly my own, that I remain curious whether this I am a brain in a jar and wrote this book for my own amusement--perhaps even to wake me from my slumber and give a hint as to the mature of reality. Never, and I include the very act of learning to read, have I had to look up so many English words in the dictionary. What a scamp. It's exactly the sort of precision and mischief that I would commit. Swivet. Gonfalon. Benthic. All so useful, and so obscure that he had to know what he was doing. And his tone, my god, his tone. Am I insane, or is it my own? Making a mockery of academia by co-opting its forms for an irreverent and covertly florid purpose? Footnotes to footnotes to footnotes, so vanishingly small that I literally had to find my monocle to read them (a fact that I'm sure delights his spirit)? Even his ideas match my own: the hand-wringing over the reality of meat, the singular take on abortion, the disdain for both prescriptive and descriptive linguistics, all things I could easily have written insofar as they are my very thoughts.
It is to be wished that his writing were not so cripplingly straight, or that this book was not primarily on topics that he did not choose, and was assigned to cover. It is even more to be wished that people like us didn't so often Robin Williams ourselves at the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment