The trick to this solution is that you have to be 100% honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked – more like unarmed. Defenseless.
The counter woman seemed unaware that Toni Ware was affecting the exact accent and cadence of her own speech. The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.
Marathe shifted in his chair. ‘In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free.
Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self’s sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.
The other nice thing about the Pump Room is the way it’s connected by tunnel to the prorectors’ rows of housing units, which means men’s rooms, which means Hal can crawl, hunch, and tiptoe into.
Chandler Foss is flossing his teeth.
And his dreams late that night, after the Braintree-Bob Death Commitment, seem to set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is.
Sono l’unica persona al mondo ad essere convinta che la causa del numero crescente di fatti di cronaca in cui persone all’apparenza assolutamente normali cominciano a sparare con pistole automatiche nei centri commerciali, nelle agenzie di assicurazione, nelle cliniche private e nei McDonald’s dipende anche dal fatto che posti del genere sono ben noti vivai di propagazione del Sorriso Professionale?
He makes a reference to candor and its value.
We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed. – Frank Bidart, “Borges and I.
I am a giant, a mountain, a planet. Everything else is far off below. My footsteps are countries, my shadow a time zone. I watch from high windows. I wash in high clouds.
Sometimes I wear sunglasses even in the house. Sometimes at the stadium I hold my hand up and look at it and I swear I can see right through it. Like that thing with the flashlight and your hand.’ ‘Hands seem to be sort of a theme to this call, thus far.’ ‘On the way in from the lot off the street here I saw a pedestrian in a pith helmet stagger and like claw at the air and pitch forward onto his face. Another Phoenician felled by the heat I think to myself.
To try and forget, rasa the tabula, wipe the memory totally out, numb it with opiates.
And here, really, is the enigma of David Foster Wallace’s work generally and Infinite Jest specifically: an endlessly, compulsively entertaining book that stingily withholds from readers the core pleasures of mainstream novelistic entertainment, among them a graspable central narrative line, identifiable movement through time, and any resolution of its quadrumvirate plotlines.
It may be that mathematics is not generally recognized as one of the arts precisely because so much pyramidal training and practice is required in order to appreciate its aesthetics; math is perhaps the ultimate in acquired tastes.
The lie is that it’s one or the other. A still, floating bee is moving faster than it can think. From overhead the sweetness drives it crazy.
Because it literally makes no sense. Close to two hundred people all punishing somebody by getting embarrassed for him, killing him by empathetically dying right there with him, for him, up there at the podium. The applause when this guy’s done has the relieved feel of a fist unclenching, and their cries of ‘Keep Coming!’ are so sincere it’s almost painful.
The medical attache partakes of neither kif nor distilled spirits, and must unwind without chemical aid.
It’s worse in Philly!
That old cartridge, Nichols and the big Indian. Distortion. They give you a general here right? They put you under. It’s not that bad. I’ll go willingly.