Everything and More Foreword (2003)

When I was a boy growing up in Ames, Iowa, I belonged to a Boy Scout troop whose adult supervision—consisting almost entirely of professors from the Iowa State University of Science and Technology—devised the following project for us to pursue when not occupied with dodgeball and clove hitches. One of the scouts’ dads—an eminent professor of agricultural engineering—obtained, from a lab in his department, a sack of genetically identical corn kernels, carried them across campus, and handed them off to one of the other scouts’ dads: a physicist employed by the Ames Laboratory. This was an offshoot of the Manhattan Project. The uranium enriched at Oak Ridge, and used in the first atomic bombs, had been refined from its ore by a process developed at Ames. Dad #2, who had been present at the startup of the world’s first atomic pile in a racquetball court at the University of Chicago, carried the seeds into a hot room buried a couple of stories beneath one of the Ames Lab’s buildings and handed it off to a mechanical arm that carried it behind a thick wall of yellowish lead-laced glass and set it down in the vicinity of something that was radioactive. After a certain amount of time had passed, he retrieved the irradiated seeds and brought them to the next meeting of our Scout troop and distributed them to the boys. I distinctly remember looking at the kernels in the palm of my hand and noting that they had been washed with paint or ink of two or three different colors, and, though the color code was not explained to us (not, at least, before the expiration of my attention span), I caught the spoor of the Scientific Method, and guessed that different batches had been exposed to greater or lesser amounts of radiation. In any case, we were directed to take these seeds home and plant them and water them. In a few weeks’ time, we would bring the results to a meeting where two prizes would be handed out: one for the tallest, healthiest corn plant, the other for the weirdest mutation. And indeed we ended up with both: proud stalks that would do any Iowa farmer proud, and plants, in many cases quite beautiful, that were scarcely recognizable as belonging to the relevant taxonomic phylum. If anyone had asked us “do you imagine that other scout troops in other towns are doing anything remotely like this” we would, after some higher-brain activity, have guessed no. No one asked, however, and so our lower brains assimilated the whole scenario as normal, like playing catch and making s’mores.

I draw the reader’s attention, in other words, to the phenomenon of the Midwestern American College Town, which, in a completely self-aware tip of the stylistic hat to David Foster Wallace, I will denominate the MACT. For the final autobiographical note that I will make in this Foreword is to say that in 1960, when I was six months old, my parents and I moved to the archetypal, if somewhat larger-than-normal, MACT of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, so that my father could get to work on his Ph.D. Two years later, when David Foster Wallace was six months old, his family moved to the same town on the same errand (his dad is a philosopher, mine an electrical engineer). He and I lived in the same MACT only until 1966, when my family moved to the smaller, but no less quintessential, MACT of Ames. I never met him, unless we happened to share a slide or a swingset in some Champaign-Urbana park. Each of us went to Massachusetts for higher education and then landed for a while in a different MACT: Iowa City in my case, Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, for DFW.

The irradiated-corn anecdote might have already said everything there’s to say about the culture of the MACT, but, since DFW and I seem to have been MACT products all the way, there are a few particulars that might be worth drawing out in a more discursive manner. So here goes.

 

PEOPLE WHO OFTEN FLY BETWEEN THE EAST AND WEST COASTS OF THE UNITED STATES will be familiar with the region, stretching roughly from the Ohio to the Platte, that, except in anomalous non-flat areas, is spanned by a Cartesian grid of roads. They may not be aware that the spacing between roads is exactly one mile. Unless they have a serious interest in 19th-Century Midwestern cartography, they can’t possibly be expected to know that when those grids were laid out, a schoolhouse was platted at every other road intersection. In this way it was assured that no child in the Midwest would ever live more than √2 miles from a place where he or she could be educated. Secondary schools were presumably sited according to some less rigid scheme, and universities were generally doled out two to a state. According to a convention that obtains pretty consistently across all states west of Ohio, a given state, call it X, is allotted a “University of X” and an “X State University.” “University of X” has been a University, as opposed to a College, from its inception, and generally houses all of the prestigious Arts-and-Sciences departments, the law school, and the medical school. “X State University” frequently started out as “X State College” and only acquired the more august “University” designation within the second half of the Twentieth Century. It is, more often than not, a land-grant institution, practical-minded, skewed toward agricultural, veterinary, and engineering departments while showing a decent respect for the liberal arts.

Normal Schools—the third tier—were post-secondary institutions whose purpose was to train the teachers who would staff those every-other-mile schoolrooms on the Cartesian road grid. The same inflationary pressure that turned X State College into X State University eventually caused these to get promoted to “University of [geographical modifier] X” or “[geographical modifier] X University,” which is how we got the University of Northern Iowa, Eastern Illinois University, and many others.

The result is a network of public universities, typically situated in small cities (population, say, between twenty and two hundred thousand) and scattered about the upper Midwest at intervals of approximately one tank of gas. Precisely because of their proximity (spang in the middle of their catchment areas); their unprepossessing rank in the academic hierarchy; their practical, down-to-earth emphases; and their athletic teams, which entertain the surrounding areas, which are too sparsely populated to support professional squads, these institutions have escaped the censure/taint of elitism or ivory towerism that, deservedly or not, tends to get slapped onto private, coastal universities by those elements of society who, when depicted cinematically, are generally shown brandishing torches and pitchforks. This may have changed during the 21st Century because of the politicization of science, but none of that existed in the MACT of the mid- to late-20th Century, when most people’s attitudes toward science were shaped more by antibiotics, the polio vaccine, and moon rockets than current this-can’t-be-happening controversies over evolution and global warming.

According to numerical metrics of selectivity, academic prestige, etc.—and believe me, these are exactly the kinds of yardsticks by which these people rule everything—these schools tend to be somewhere behind the prestigious and older private schools of the coasts (not because the people are any dumber but because it is part of their mission to pull in the whole spectrum of academic talent whereas coastal institutions are lodged in well-defined strata). That combined with the habitually dour and self-deprecating, not to say passive-aggressive, character of residents of the upper Midwest, has left them with chips on their shoulders and an embarrassing tendency to denote themselves as “The Harvard of the Midwest” or what-have you. Seen in a longer perspective and without the overlay of coast-vs.-Midwest politics, however, the achievements of the state universities are more remarkable, and certainly more unusual, in that one would not necessarily expect newish, publicly funded institutions to be able to make such respectable showings in competition with far older, privately funded schools that have nothing to do except pile up their endowments century after century and educate the cleverest, best-prepared scions of powerful families.

I describe, here, a situation that existed during the second half of the Twentieth Century. It might be different now. But in those days, graduate students and faculty members U-Hauled from MACT to MACT somewhat in the manner of Arabs oasis-hopping across otherwise inhospitable terrain, and all of the MACTs, mutatis mutandis, were the same. Only the school colors and mascots really differed.

Geographical isolation is key to MACT culture. If you have an academic position in, say, greater Boston, you are spending your working days in a culture similar to that of the MACT, but when you go back to your house in Saugus or your apartment in Allston-Brighton, you’re in a place where, even if you’re not making more money than the people around you, you do enjoy an at least theoretically exalted status by virtue of your advanced degree and your prestigious job. Some people will treat you with a degree of deference. Even those who don’t remind you of what an odd duck you are in the larger scheme. Whereas if you are in a MACT you are accorded no sense of specialness whatsoever.

And, remember, these are the professors themselves I’m talking about. The professors’ kids, growing up in a community where all of the other kids had Ph.D. parents, never acquired in the first place, and so did not have to lose, their sense of belonging to a special, or even an unusual, class.

There are certain other peculiarities of the MACT that might find their place in a longer treatment of the topic, such as the way that garbage collectors’ sons and farmers’ daughters ended up being treated the same as everyone else, as long as they were smart, and the way that grad students from what were in those days seen as extremely exotic and remote places (Thailand, Afghanistan, Nigeria) were surprised, not always happily, to see their children fully and unquestioningly integrated into small-town Midwestern society, going to keggers and t.p.-ing their friends’ houses as if their ancestors had come over on the Mayflower.

The premise of this Foreword, which will be nailed to the mast very shortly, is that in Everything and More, David Foster Wallace is speaking in a language and employing a style of inquiry that might strike people who have not breathed the air of Ames, Bloomington-Normal, and Champaign-Urbana as unusual enough to demand some sort of an explanation. And that, lacking such background, many of DFW’s critics fall into a common pattern of error, which consists of attempting to explain his style and approach by imputing certain stances or motives to him, then becoming nonplussed, huffy, or downright offended by same. It’s a mistake that befuddles MACT natives who see this book as simply what it is: one of the other smart kids trying to explain some cool stuff.

 

THE REGRETTABLE FACT THAT (BARRING POSSIBLE RANDOM PLAYGROUND ENCOUNTERS) I never actually met Mr. Wallace is not necessarily a disqualification from writing a Foreword. For that, all that is strictly required is some familiarity with the work being introduced. But since anyone can read Everything and More, that hardly makes for a unique, or even an unusual, qualification, and so my strategy here will be to predicate certain things of DFW and his work, based solely on our common MACT provenance, that are wild guesses, but that I’m pretty sure are right. This could be developed at heinous length, but since what you are reading is merely a foreword to the actual book (“booklet”—DFW) I am going to lay my core thesis directly on the line and put it to you that this is all about a quintessentially MACTish denial, or at least shrugging-off, of an attitude toward knowledge that in the Greek tradition is conveyed in the story of Prometheus and, in the Judeo-Christian, in that of Eve.

Here, in a conjectural version of this Foreword that was more dignified and old-school, those two myths would be recounted and glossed. Matters being what they are, I will encourage anyone unfamiliar with them to consult Google before proceeding. These are meant to be scary, cautionary tales to keep Bronze Age peons from asking difficult questions of their betters. To say that they have outlived their usefulness is wrong, since they were never useful to begin with. At some level, though, we’ve all imbibed them and they can be invoked in rhetoric to elicit certain predictable responses. By and large, these enure to the benefit of those who have acquired lots of knowledge. You might not think so, for the Promethean myth is ostensibly a knock on academics. Not so ostensibly, though, it gives scientists a reason to put on priestly airs and, by hinting at the perhaps not-so-priestly stances of their counterparts in other countries, haul down defense grants. And it gives non-scientists an implicit pitchfork to brandish in the scientists’ faces. Accordingly, a kind of deal has been struck in which both scientists and non-scientists have ended up accepting the Promethean myth as being a passable model of reality. Call this the Promethean consensus. The Promethean consensus is something that no one would ever admit to believing in, if you pinned them down and tried to get them to engage in that level of introspection, but is universally hammered home by every movie and TV show about science and a good many books as well, and obviously underlies the public postures that scientists are expected to adopt.

Once you’ve bought into it, the only two stances you can really take toward the Promethean consensus are to respect its rules or to wilfully break them. You are either a priest or a bad boy. Priest because, if you are one of the keepers of the academic flame and are willing to allow that some of your knowledge is dangerous, you can get a lot of mileage out of intoning the right solemn and portentous sound bites. Bad boy because the downside of the Promethean myth has largely gone away. No one is getting expelled from the Garden of Eden or being chained to a rock to have his liver torn by vultures any more. It’s true that modern-day scientists have to take their share of flak, but, with the exception of people who run girls’ schools in Afghanistan, or the occasional biomed researcher who’s run afoul of animal-rights activists, they no longer have to dodge pitchforks. And so if you’re one of the people who actually has access to Promethean-grade knowledge, there’s no longer much personal risk, and so, to the extent that the knowledge is perceived as dangerous, it can just feel kind of cool, in a naughty way, like you’re a teenager who just figured out where Dad hides the keys to his gun cabinet.

Neither of these seemed to be going on with the irradiated corn seeds. Clearly, giving that kind of stuff to kids is non-priestly behavior. But when they were handed out at the scout meeting, or when we were exposed to sacred knowledge in countless other ways in the MACT, it was never done with an attitude of “we’re getting away with something—aren’t we being naughty” but rather “here’s some interesting and perhaps useful knowledge that any well-brought-up young person will want to have.”

So the Promethean consensus is not much in evidence in the MACT. After I went Coastal, I committed a string of social gaffes in which I failed to address or introduce some Ph.D.-endowed person with the correct title. We simply never did this where I grew up because it would have given us the faintly comical affect of characters in The Crucible addressing one another as “Goodman this” and “Goodwife that” (in our town there was one man, not employed in academia, who had a Ph.D., and who insisted on being addressed by his title. The view taken of him by everyone else might most politely be described as bemused).

In the preceding paragraph I am using a somewhat tawdry rhetorical shortcut by making fun of people who are pompous about academic titles, and readers from academic, but non-MACT, environments are probably getting hot under the collar and feeling as though they’ve been ill used by a thoroughly odious hit-and-run straw-man argument, so let me make clear right away that it’s way more complicated than I’m making it sound, and that professors at Harvard and Cambridge and Bologna and Berkeley address one another by their first names all the time.

But I am, however crudely, trying to direct the reader’s attention to the fact that, even among academics who ride bicycles to work and wear T-shirts and blue jeans and eschew use of formal titles, there are certain strictures and rules and bright lines and hierarchies that Must Be Respected and that people who violate them can find themselves the object of crazily vehement retribution. And here I feel I am on firmer rhetorical ground since anyone who has spent time on any rung of that ladder will probably have at least one face-burning anecdote about how he or she ran afoul of these strictures and got crucified in a faculty meeting or a letter to the editor or rampant email thread. I put it to you that, improbable as it might seem, MACT natives can grow up not being keenly aware of those rules, somewhat as the Eloi never twigged to the fact that they were Morlock chow. As I have tried to demonstrate with the irradiated-corn anecdote, the MACT breeds an anti-Promethean nonchalance that really rubs some people the wrong way. Every paragraph of Everything and More is imbued with it.

 

IT IS AN EXPECTATION, AND A REASONABLE ENOUGH ONE, THAT ANYONE who ventures to write about mathematics must make some kind of positive advance or else shut up. Exceptions are made for occasional review articles, which summarize other results without presenting new material per se, but even a review needs to be written to sufficiently exacting standards that a serious, let us say Ph.D.-level, student of the field in question can take every statement in the thing at face value and never be exposed to the risk that some part of it, in retrospect, might be found to have been glossed over, rearranged, or out-and-out screwed up. So if one is playing by the rules of academic publishing, writing an intellectually serious book about math that engages in some rearrangement and glossing over, as DFW explicitly does in Everything and More, is not looked on favorably.

Another practice that seems to make tenured academics practically hop up and down in rage is the crossing of boundaries between sub-sub-disciplines (or, in the case of history, geographical regions or chronological epochs) to write articles that pull together a number of threads and point out common themes among them. The exact reasons for this taboo are probably best left to anthropologists or psychologists, but I infer that this sort of thing is viewed as a privilege gained only with age and emeritus-level distinction and that to write any such material before the age of 60 gets one designated as a whippersnapper, which, in the academic world, is the setup for retributive measures of a severity normally seen only in Greek myths.

So the rules of the academic publishing road are both strict and cruelly enforced. This imposes some narrow and hard limits on what smart people can get away with writing about, which are sufficiently restrictive that some effort goes into finding loopholes. The biggest of these appears to be science fiction. SF novelists arrogate to themselves and, by convention, are readily afforded, a kind of court jester’s immunity. And indeed there have been any number of hard science professors who have donned the motley, taken up the pen, and written more or less successful works of hard science fiction as a way of dodging those two terrible strictures against popularization/simplification, and synoptic pulling-together-of-diverse-strands.

It is also permissible for serious academics to write books that are explicitly targeted at general readers, though again this tends to be viewed as whippersnapperish behavior if indulged in too early in one’s career.

To this point, then, we have two categories of books-about-real-science-for-non-specialist-readers: the hard SF novel and the popularizing book written by an actual scientist. There is a third category, in which a writer, well-educated, but without formal credentials in the field in question, immerses himself in the subject matter and then does his level best to explain it. There is a tendency, which is by no means a bad thing, for such books to become somewhat self-referential and autobiographical as the author tells the tale of his own self-education. While the premise, explained this way, sounds dodgy, these books can be really good, since the writer knows what it’s like to not understand the material, and can tell the story of learning it as a narrative.

A fourth category, seemingly quite different from #3 but in some ways similar, is the History of Science book, which generally takes the form of a narrative about the efforts of one or more scientists to figure something out. Here the questing author of the Type 3 book is replaced, as protagonist, by the actual scientist who figured it all out in the first place.

Again, this Foreword might be a more respectable—certainly it would be longer—document if it now listed specific examples of each of the above-mentioned four types of books and engaged in some actual literary criticism. But anyone who is bothering to read an introduction by an SF novelist to a book about infinity by DFW probably has examples of all four types on her bookshelf and so this will be left, as the saying goes, as an exercise for the reader. Just to be clear, though, I will list some examples:

Type 1: Any fiction by Gregory Benford

Type 2: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Type 3: 1491 by Charles Mann

Type 4: Einstein in Berlin by Tom Levenson

What is clearly true about all of these types of books is that they are safe to write, in the sense that critically-minded readers from the academic world will fairly quickly say to themselves, “ah, this is one of those” and then, if they wish to criticize them, will do so according to the rules of that type.

Everything and More occupies a hard-to-pin-down space in the Venn diagram that has been taking shape in preceding paragraphs (and before going into detail on that, I’ll just supply the premonitory information that books without a clear coordinate on the Venn diagram tend to make people crazy, since this makes it unclear which set of interpretive and critical ground rules is to be applied).

To begin with, DFW was arguably a science fiction writer (Infinite Jest), although he probably would not have classified himself as such. Of course Everything and More is not SF, or even F, at all, pace some of its detractors, but the mere fact of DFW’s having been an SF kind of guy muddies the taxonomic waters before we have even gotten started. Novelists—who almost by definition hold motley and informal credentials, when they are credentialed at all—make for an uneasy fit with the academic world, where credentials are everything. And writers who produce books on technical subjects aimed at non-technical readers are doomed to get cranky reviews from both sides: anything short of a fully peer-reviewed monograph is simply wrong and subject to censure from people whose job it is to get it right, and any material that requires unusual effort to read undercuts the work’s claim to be accessible to a general audience. So in writing a book such as Everything and More, DFW reminds us of the soldier who earns a medal by calling in an artillery strike on his own position; with the possible elaboration that in this case he’s out in the middle of no-man’s land calling in strikes from both directions.

DFW’s degree was in modal logic, which, if you haven’t seen it, is indistinguishable, by almost all laymen, from pure math, though even more punishingly abstract than mathematics could ever be. Though he did not pursue that career to a Ph.D. and an academic post, the fact that he was able to study such a recondite field at all clearly marks him out as having had what it took to be a hard science/math/logic professional, and, therefore, in the eyes of hard-math critics, as fair game. We must therefore ask whether Everything and More is to be taken as a serious technical book by an actual scientist, or a popularization. Its editors clearly asked for the latter and eventually took delivery of something closer to the former. Which is not to say that DFW makes actual technical advances in mathematics—he doesn’t, and doesn’t try or claim to—but that he immersed himself in the material in a way that the editors of this series could not reasonably have asked or expected any writer to do, and pitched many parts of the text at a higher technical level than is generally considered a good move in books whose mission it is to popularize science. Which, if all DFW cared about was getting a uniformly rapturous critical reception, might not have been the best tactical approach. But he doesn’t appear to have been this kind of guy at all.

In immune-system lingo, the equation-laden sections of Everything and More cause it to express certain antigens that arouse the retributive ardor of hard-science and math reviewers. The analogy being apposite here because the immune system, when aroused, can elicit a range of reactions from a mild sense that something isn’t right, to irritation, to hives, to full-on T-cell counterattack and organ rejection.

Finally, Everything and More, in many sections, alternates between being a Type 3 and a Type 4 (see above taxonomic breakdown) in that, part of the time, we are getting autobiographical material about how DFW learned mathematics, mostly under one Dr. Goris, and part of the time it becomes a History of Science book in which we learn about the lives and careers of Dedekind, Weierstrass, Cantor, et al.

Having as it were set all of those pieces out on the board, the weakest possible claim that I can now assert is that I really like this book and that, as I was reading it, it never even occurred to me to be troubled, confused, annoyed, or nonplussed by any of the features alluded to: the fact that it was written by a fiction writer, the excursions into highly technical discourse, the caveats—clearly and repeatedly stated by DFW—that the technical bits simplified and glossed over material in a way that wouldn’t be satisfactory to mathematicians, and the use of both autobiographical, and just plain biographical, material. My advice, therefore, dear reader, is that you simply read it, and that if you happen to be a math major you then peruse some of the trenchant criticisms of the book that have appeared in the mathematical literature, and improve your understanding of the pure-math content by studying peer-reviewed documents on the same topics, and, in general, make sure that this is not the last thing you read on the topic before your orals.

Having supplied that exhortation I will add one piece of advice about how to read this book, which is to relax and pay no attention—beyond, of course, reading and enjoying it—to one feature of this book that has engendered an absurd volume of critical boggling, namely, DFW’s habit of employing informal pop/slang expressions in close juxtaposition with high-end vocabulary and while talking about fancy stuff. This is nothing except good writing. The vernacular is often the most expressive wing of the language. DFW could write high-powered prose better than just about anyone but he well knew the value of mixing it with informal day-to-day English, and, though he was especially good at it, it’s worth keeping in mind that he was hardly the first great English writer to do so. For every Milton who kept it all on an elevated plane there was a Shakespeare who knew how to sock us in the chops with some well-timed plain talk (among reviewers with humanities degrees, it also seems compulsory to make some remark—or, just as well, to go on at some length—on “post-modernism,” a topic of zero interest to most actual readers).

I infer that some whose academic reputations have been put into play by the assignment to write a review of this book have felt provoked or confused by DFW’s disinclination or outright refusal to don the mortarboard—the lofty academic style of expression—that’s expected of people who want to thrive within that system, but that can be swapped out, by novelists, in favor of the court jester’s cap ’n’ bells. A dead giveaway being the habit of following a quote from DFW’s prose by “(sic).” As long as you are not the sort of person who is in the habit of using “(sic)” after quoting others’ work in your own written communications, you should be okay with the style in which Everything and More has been written.

 

THE FOREGOING HAS BEEN ALL NEGATIVE, NOT IN THE POP-PSYCH SENSE OF adopting a dispiriting tone, but in the purely technical sense that it has been about negating a number of predicates (DFW didn’t buy into the Promethean consensus, Everything and More doesn’t fit into such-and-such bubble on the Venn diagram, certain criticisms of the book aren’t that interesting or useful to most readers). I would like to end with something positive (both in the pop-psych and the technical senses). DFW’s writing reflects an attitude that is lovely: a touching, and for the most part well-founded, belief that you can explain anything with words if you work hard enough and show your readers sufficient respect. While it has probably existed in other times and places, it is a Midwestern American College Town attitude all the way.

As an explanation for milder allergic reactions—and, having proselytized DFW’s writing to many friends over the years, I’ve seen a few—some readers posit (often vaguely and fretfully) that there is some archness or smart-assery in DFW’s literary style. This, to me anyway, is an unsupportable conclusion, given the obvious love that DFW brings to what he’s writing about, and his explicitly stated opposition to irony-as-lifestyle in his essay E Unibus Pluram. Why do people see it when it’s not there? It’s something to do with the fact that his conspicuous verbal talent and wordplay create a nagging sense among some readers that there’s a joke here that they’re not getting or that they are somehow being made fools of by an agile knave. Which DFW was not.

To me Everything and More reads, rather, as a discourse from a green, gridded prairie heaven, where irony-free people who’ve been educated to a turn in those prairie schoolhouses and great-but-unpretentious universities sit around their dinner tables buttering sweet corn, drinking iced tea, and patiently trying to explain even the most recondite mysteries of the universe, out of a conviction that the world must be amenable to human understanding, and that if you can understand something, you can explain it in words: fancy words if that helps, plain words if possible. But in any case you can reach out to other minds through that medium of words and make a connection. Handing out irradiated corn kernels to a troop of Boy Scouts, and writing books that explain difficult matters in disarmingly informal language, are the same act, a way of saying here is something cool that I want to share with you for no reason other than making the spark jump between minds. If that is how you have been raised, then to explain anything to anyone is a pleasure. To explain difficult things is a challenge. And to explain the infamously difficult ideas that were spawned in chiliastic profusion during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries (Infinities, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Hilbert’s problems, Gödel’s Proof) is Mount Everest.

So in reading Everything and More, cleverness or verbal pyrotechnics or archness are not the emotional tone that comes through to me, but a kind of open-soulness and desire to connect that were touching before, and heartbreaking after, David Foster Wallace succumbed, at the age of 46, to a cruel and incurable disease. Because of this we will not have the opportunity to enjoy and profit from many other explanations that it was in his power to supply on diverse topics, lofty and mundane, and so we must content ourselves with what he did leave behind—an impossibility given the pleasure and the insight he gave us in Everything and More, and his obvious ability to have provided much more, had fortune treated him with as much consideration as he did his readers.