Consider this David, if only briefly. Though can one be brief on a subject like David Foster Wallace? His output in terms of page numbers alone so exceeds his short life, it is hard to know where to begin. And yet. David Foster Wallace was someone who thought constantly about attention. On this subject, Wallace took an unusual tack: he emphasized the ethics of how we choose to guide our thoughts, moment to moment. And, as well, the stakes. Wallace thought that attention could save your life, although, in the end, it did not save his own.
At Kenyon, in 2005, giving his commencement speech, Wallace told the kids: “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
Wallace died three years later, taking his life at his home in Claremont, California, losing the long, brutal battle with depression that had begun when he was a teenager. But the great big theme of attention that he chose to dedicate his speech to had in fact been on his mind, and in his work, long before he stood at that college lectern to address the graduating seniors. Wallace—in different periods of his life a television binge watcher, competitive tennis player, math and logic whiz, and devourer of information—laced themes of attention and distraction throughout much of his work.
I may as well confess: I made it through Infinite Jest only recently, though it has sat on my shelf for years. And, actually, it was one of the mightiest feats of attention I have attempted in the last decade. I read it through the dog days of August in New York City, schlepping it onto humid subway platforms, propping it up awkwardly on my lap as I sought respite on sweaty sofa cushions, setting for myself a fifty-page daily minimum to ensure I would at least get somewhere with it by Labor Day.
Just under a thousand pages long (to say nothing of the endnotes, to say nothing of the footnotes that accompany many of the endnotes), it is a book written, in one sense, for a pre-iPhone brain, minutely detailed, endlessly populated, a novel that moves in millimeters. In an interview, Wallace once likened his writing style to “an enormous eyeball floating around something, reporting what it sees.” On the other hand, Infinite Jest is perfectly, almost uncannily suited for our digital age, its fragmented narrative jumping from one stream of ideas to the next. Wallace mirrors back to us exactly the kind of splintered thinking we’ve now grown used to through all the hours we spend online.
To my surprise, the experience of reading this book, the radical commitment it required, imbued those weeks of my life with a charged atmosphere, a special, elevated quality that took me outside the wearying ephemera to be found on my various screens and transported me back to an earlier time, before I could have even imagined a thing like Instagram. Though not Wallace: he knew what was coming. In Infinite Jest, he imagines a world in which people sat at home watching on-demand programming delivered over the “interlace,” “pulsed in,” filling their homes with compulsively diverting entertainments.
Infinite Jest was published in 1996, the same year that two Stanford students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin began the research project that would soon produce Google. Microsoft had just launched Internet Explorer. It was also the year that Adderall hit the American market. Much of the book’s action takes place in the near future, in the fictional town of Enfield, Massachusetts (Have you ever been to Enfield?), in two locales: a tennis academy for teenagers and a halfway house for down-and-out adults. Tennis and addiction—in both cases, Wallace wrote from direct experience.
In Infinite Jest, the tennis academy sits on top of the hill; the halfway house, down in the shadows below it. There is also, somehow, a squadron of legless, wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatist assassins. They are seeking an infamous weapon of war: a video cartridge, called “Infinite Jest,” that is so extremely, so universally entertaining, those watching simply cannot look away. Mesmerized, they are rooted in place, they soil themselves, they do not sleep or eat. They have to be carted away to institutions where they live out their days in a state of vegetative blankness. Either that or they simply remain in place, eyes glued to the screen, stuck in their chair, where, pretty soon, they die.
One of these legless assassins, Rémy Marathe, provides the book’s most pointed commentary on the American obsession with being constantly entertained. Marathe is the book’s moral arbiter, questioning the American habit of entrancing ourselves so promiscuously, so indiscriminately. “Choose with care,” he says. “You are what you love. No?”
It was clear to Wallace that we were, for the most part, utterly failing in this task. To be careful, to be deliberate about what we embrace. About where we spend our precious attention.
Actually, I do not believe there is anything accidental or incidental about the twinning of Wallace’s two great themes: attention and addiction. It has taken me a long time to understand how deeply interconnected they are. It has taken me, in fact, getting to know Wallace’s work to understand the connection. They both have everything to do with being able to sit with yourself; to bear the often dull, sometimes agonizing task of just sitting with yourself.
By the time I read Infinite Jest, I may have gotten off the Adderall, but I still hadn’t answered the question underlying that whole addicted decade. I didn’t even know what it was, didn’t see that what I was asking was this: Is my natural-born attention possibly enough? Is it going to be enough? Every time I took a pill, I was answering no, of course. But even long after I stopped, even as I type these words now, I am still asking that same question.
Wallace told the journalist David Lipsky: “The technology’s gonna get better and better at doing what it does, which is seduce us into being incredibly dependent on it, so that advertisers can be more confident that we will watch their advertisements.” Lipsky, a brainy young writer from New York, had come to write a profile of Wallace for Rolling Stone. Which was fitting, because, with the appearance of Infinite Jest, Wallace was now almost as rock-star famous as a novelist could get. During that week together, the two Davids, both in their thirties, traveled around the Midwest in cars and planes and said deep things to each other, while Lipsky smoked and Wallace spat his endless stream of chewing tobacco into a series of different tin cans. “It’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money,” Wallace continued. “Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re gonna die.”
Gradually, the explicit emphasis on addiction faded from his work, but Wallace never stopped writing about attention. By his forties, he’d become interested in meditation and Eastern thought, themes of which—awareness, compassion, freedom—so clearly animate “This Is Water.” I saw why, inevitably, Wallace would have gravitated to the ancient Eastern techniques. He needed to escape his own mind. And the great promise of meditation is that you can: by paying close attention to your mind, to the moods and thoughts it produces, you gradually learn that you are not identical with those moods and thoughts. Pay attention “ardently.” So instructs the Buddha to the meditator. So, in his way, did Wallace instruct those Kenyon kids, in the years that followed.
But Wallace struggled with the practice. His biographer D. T. Max reports that Wallace stumbled on the fine print. “Is it OK to sit in a chair? Or is severe pain part of the (non) point?” he once asked an experienced meditator. “Is it half-lotus or nothing? If so, why?” Wallace enrolled in a two-week meditation course in Plum Village, France, run by the Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh. Wallace left early. He wrote to his friend Don DeLillo, blaming the food.
It wasn’t the first time Wallace had tried to become an adherent. Googling “David Foster Wallace” and “God” one day, I find a beautiful essay on Christianity Today’s website, written by Warren Cole Smith. Smith is writing on the tenth anniversary of Wallace’s death, describing an underappreciated aspect of Wallace’s life: his attraction to faith, his desire to believe. Wallace’s father, a professor, was a passionate atheist, writes Smith, but Wallace was attracted to religion, regularly watched religious programs on television, and tried, at least once, to join the Catholic Church. But “he had too many questions.” When he got into AA, he was faced with similar questions, now in the form of the requirement: “to surrender to a power higher than ourselves.” Whatever he may have felt about that admonishment, however unrealistic or “cliché,” Wallace stayed clean.
at the age of forty-six, his longtime editor at Little, Brown, Michael Pietsch, scraped together the manuscript pages Wallace had been working on at the time of his death. Which, it’s worth mentioning, Wallace had left in a neat enough arrangement for Pietsch to assemble into a book. The Pale King, a novel that takes place in the world of the IRS, was published in 2011. It is a book about taxes and tedium. To my mind, it is the culmination of years of thought about the power of attention in defining a human life.
In fact, while reading The Pale King, it was impossible not to notice that for long stretches at a time, the word “attention” seemed to pop up on almost every page. Indeed, according to at least one tally, “attention” appears 150 times in Wallace’s final work of fiction. David Wallace himself is a character in his book, cropping up sporadically. “Author, here,” he likes to begin. On one of these occasions he offers what I consider to be the keystone passage, the question driving every line of his final book: “why we recoil from the dull.”
“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there,” he writes. “…I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”
This “something else” that Wallace alludes to, this something else that “everyone knows it’s about.” A moment to pause and consider what he meant by this. Why are we so susceptible to all the escape routes our technologies offer us in the first place? What are we fleeing? In many ways, as I thought about attention, I realized that this was the question I cared most about, the single question I wanted to answer. Or, at the very least, to ask.
I had nearly finished The Pale King when I went to visit Wallace’s final residence. It was the only literary pilgrimage I’d ever undertaken. I drove from Los Angeles to Claremont, California, on a Monday afternoon in October, ten years and one month after his death, my dog-eared copy of his last published book on the shotgun seat of my rental car. I had found the address after a little Internet sleuthing. It was not the address invoked by Wallace as occasional narrator in The Pale King. (“David Wallace,” he writes. “Age 40, SS no 975-04-2012, addressing you from my Form 8829-deductible home office at 725 Indian Hill Blvd, Claremont 91711 CA, on this fifth day of spring, 2005.”) Rather, I was in search of the second house he lived in in Claremont, the one that was farther out of town, just beneath where the hills began.
Wallace had lived in this house with his wife, Karen Green, an artist he married in his forties, a woman around his own age, who already had a teenage son when they met. Wallace had been engaged several times, but this was his only marriage. And, by all accounts, it was a good one, marking a largely peaceful phase in Wallace’s life. He had moved to Claremont to teach creative writing at Pomona College. Now, instead of the fierce midwestern winters, he walked his big dogs in abundant West Coast sunshine all year long. And, actually, this is what I was thinking about when I arrived at the home he had shared with Green: the light. The five-o’clock liquid-gold sunlight, washing the whole sky, the whole street, in its forgiving glow. I couldn’t help but think: How could he decide to say goodbye to this light?
Wallace and Green’s place turned out to be a mid-century tract house, with pebbles out front and various succulents planted therein. The garage, I knew, had served as Wallace’s office. And it was in the garage that Michael Pietsch found the trail Wallace had left for him, the trail of manuscript pages and computer files that would lead to the publishing of The Pale King. When I arrived, no one was home, it seemed, except for a dog, barking loudly, peering out at me in a canine hysteria from one uncovered portion of the living room window. The rest of the glass was concealed by a thin white curtain.
According to D. T. Max, it was while they lived in this house on this quiet, pretty, suburban street that Wallace and Green went out to dinner one night at a local Persian restaurant. Afterward, Wallace became sick. His doctor suggested taking him off the antidepressant he’d been on for decades, Nardil, because it had so many restrictions and side effects. The thinking here was that maybe Wallace had grown out of the depression by now and could function without meds or, at worst, replace the Nardil with a more modern alternative. And the thinking was catastrophic, it turned out. Off the Nardil for the first time in more than twenty years, Wallace walked straight into darkness, months and months of it. Even when he went back on the Nardil, it no longer worked as it had before. Nothing worked for him now. Toward the end, his parents came here to Claremont, to sit with him.
By then, Wallace had people with him almost all the time, keeping him company. But one day, after Wallace’s parents had returned to Illinois, Green went out for a few hours, leaving him alone. When Green got home, she found that her husband had hanged himself on their patio.
with his work when he decided to quit Nardil—was bored with his old tricks and unable to muster enough excitement about his new novel to find a way forward with it—is not inconsequential,” writes Jonathan Franzen, in “Farther Away,” the essay he published in The New Yorker a few years after Wallace’s death. Franzen, an old friend, spent time with Wallace during the final summer of his life, coming to sit with him in Claremont, just as Wallace’s parents did. At the time, Franzen was preparing to travel to Ecuador on a bird-watching trip. In Claremont, even in the face of Wallace’s black depression, Franzen was busy learning the names of all the native birds he might see. He registered the chasm that now lay between himself and his old friend, who seemed to have lost the ability to care, to be interested by or absorbed in the world.
David had died of boredom. That was one of the conclusions Franzen reached while traveling to a remote island in the South Pacific known as Masafuera. He went there two years after Wallace’s death, to look at birds, to read Robinson Crusoe, and to be alone—alone in the hope he might finally feel something other than rage about his friend’s decision to take his own life. Boredom: the subject of Wallace’s final book. The subject of so much of his thinking and writing. Had it done him in, in the end? Had his prodigious, almost superhuman attention failed him? Was it that he could no longer face what Simone Weil called “the horror of the void”? Or, Wallace himself: “the terror of silence.” I knew it well, of course. The urge to shatter that silence, that boredom, to reach for our phones, our drugs, our achievements. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.
Standing out on Oak Hollow Road, I felt a need to lay eyes on the patio where Wallace had died. The longer I stood on the street, the more powerful the impulse became. No one was home yet, except for the dog. But then a man appeared in the driveway next door, introducing himself. He had only moved in that summer. He hadn’t known that David Foster Wallace lived next door. In fact, he was only vaguely familiar with Wallace’s work, he said. But he was intrigued by my quest, and he allowed me to come into his backyard, where I stood on a little wooden chair and peered over the wall. From there, I was looking directly down onto Wallace’s old patio. Nothing marked the spot, of course, at least nothing I could detect. It was a small paved area, an all-American tableau, with a covered barbeque and a string of twinkle lights attached to the single tree. Yet the sight of it was indescribably powerful.
Still on my lookout chair, I pulled out my phone and called my boyfriend, Josh. At that moment, he was in Los Angeles, doing something respectable, no doubt. “I want you to know I’m on a chair in a stranger’s yard looking at the place where David Foster Wallace died,” I told him. “Is this night going to end with me bailing you out of jail?” he asked me. I was aware how macabre this might seem, what I was doing, and how invasive. But somehow, it felt like paying homage, this effort, this futile effort to try to understand what had happened.
that Wallace’s Kenyon commencement speech earned the title “This Is Water” is how it begins. “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’
“If you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be,” Wallace continued that day at Kenyon. “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”
This story, this parable, had been with Wallace a long time. It makes an appearance at the halfway point of Infinite Jest, published a decade earlier. It is spoken by a man named Robert F. outside an AA meeting, who speaks it while straddling his motorcycle, a girl behind him, her arms around his waist. He tells it to Don Gately, former addict-burglar, now sober resident of Ennet House, but still trying to find or even define his “higher power.” As soon as Robert F. tells the parable, like the seasoned old fish himself, he departs, blasting away on his bike, leaving Don Gately there to ponder his meaning. That the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
As it happened, I bought my copy of Infinite Jest in January 2014, at a beautiful little bookstore called Three Lives & Company in Manhattan’s West Village. As I handed it to the clerk, he asked me: “Is this a New Year’s resolution?” His question prompted the man browsing the nearby table display to look up, seemingly to find out about what I might be purchasing. Out of the corner of my eye, I had actually assumed this man to be homeless, because he was so extremely disheveled, but more than that: so vulnerable, so completely down-and-out. When he raised his head at the clerk’s question, though, I saw that it was the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. The clerk and I seemed to process this information at the same time. We looked at each other, stunned. A week later, Hoffman was dead at forty-six, just like Wallace, found in his nearby apartment on Bethune Street with a needle in his arm, having returned to drugs after decades of sobriety. And I was back on Adderall.
It was one of the countless times I’ve temporarily slipped back into old patterns since the initial break from the drug, succumbing to the same wishful thinking that allowed me to enter into the addiction in the first place. Something like: Why not? Why not supercharge my system and live each day with boundless energy and ready-made focus? Why not override my own uncertain self with the guarantee of a chemical self? Each relapse doesn’t last long, a few days maybe, never quite a week, but each time, I have to go back to the beginning, to review the reasons for amphetamine sobriety, the pounding, existential need to not be on this drug. These reasons include big-ticket items, like work, love, and authenticity. But also, even more immediately: attention. Because what I know by now, after all these nearly identical go-rounds, is that Adderall does nothing to enhance my ability to absorb the world, to intuit the essence, to, as Wallace recommends, imagine my way out of my own little predicament and into someone else’s. On the contrary: Adderall directly impedes these very goals, erecting tight walls around me, boxing me into smallness, and causing me, again and again, to entirely miss the point.