On the first plane I start finding Varieties of Religious Experience (already the coincidences begin) a little heavy for travel purposes. So I buy a New Yorker in the MTL airport because all the other magazines are terrible and/or French, and because it has an article about my ex-favourite-living-author's, David Foster Wallace's, life, work, depression, suicide, and soon-to-be-published unfinished novel. Reading it on the plane as we leave MTL, I begin noticing that the parallels between his life and mine are numerous and alarming.
In university, for instance, he majored in philosophy and mathematics (my double major until I figured out that I'm too dumb for the math part), and experienced a personal crisis when philosophy turned out not to answer all the questions he wanted it to. The haunting way he put it to a friend later was, "I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn't auger well for my longevity."
"Hmm... that happened to me at twenty-five," I'm thinking, "and he lasted till 47, so that gives me..."
He continued to battle depression with anti-depressants, but found that they stifled him emotionally and creatively. Not that I've ever had anything near his level of clinical depression, but I have definitely had a miniature version of that experience. Then he hit upon mindfulness, especially in states that would usually be called boredom, as a way past one's distractable and negative inner voice and out the other side to happiness. "I have reached a state where I enjoy boredom," I remember telling people a couple of winters ago. "I actually prefer it to excitement." This apparently worked well for him for awhile. I don't know whether he actually ever meditated, but all these details are eerily familiar to me as a narrative arc of adult life, and are beginning to freak me out.
At this point, the flight attendant interrupts my reading to say, "For your information, there are two washrooms on this aircraft," which immediately makes me think, "I've never heard the euphemism 'information' before," which I then just as immediately realize is a DFW joke if ever there was one. I look sadly out the window on the right side of the plane, where I see the most incredible display of reflected sunlight and mattressy clouds, white silt swirls and the constantly changing tinfoil crinkles of waves on Lake Ontario. All four elements are beautifully represented, each in its own dimension à la Escher's Three Worlds, and together they all look gorgeous.I decide then that this article and possibly the ghost of DFW must in fact be trying to tell me something wonderful, and not that I am doomed to a death by my own hand before the age of 50. The article continues on with the idea of boredom as the possible solution to our cultural and personal addictions, a set of problems laid out quite well in Infinite Jest. Turns out that's what DFW's unfinished novel is about. It's set in an IRS office, and the main character is a tax accountant who spends the novel trying to figure out how to deal with the almost indescribable (except we know DFW will give it his best shot) boredom of possibly the most boring job in the world. Presumably, by the end he would achieve some kind of breakthrough which DFW himself had not yet achieved and now never will. I take this to mean that it's time for me to sit down and do my taxes.
- Andrew
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