Forget, won't you, the questionable grammar of that title. My point is this: After having re-read David Foster Wallace's essay "Consider the Lobster" for the class I teach, I'm reminded of the extraordinary loss we* experienced last fall when the aforementioned author took his own life. He was 46 years old.
A. J. Liebling, another thinker/humorist/journalist, albeit one with a seemingly happier life than DFW, wrote a vast quantity of his most-beloved books after age 46, included The Sweet Science, The Earl of Louisiana, and Between Meals.
John Updike, prolific and revered, wrote nearly half his oeuvre after his fiftieth birthday: the latter two Rabbit books, eight short-story collections, four books of poetry, both Eastwick novels, seven other novels, and eight collected works of essays and nonfiction.
Joan Didion, still with us, published her vaunted collection The White Album in her forty-fifth year. Two novels and six nonfiction tomes came after, including After Henry, Salvador, and The Year of Magical Thinking.
The exercise could continue. But imagine: All this, erased, never put down on the page. Others would have filled those lines, somehow. I can't believe they would have matched the energy and vigor with which these writers continued to document their surroundings. Maybe this is a fruitless thought-drama: "Take away Shakespeare, and.... go!" Maybe I'm holding up DFW to unfairly high standards, to peers in higher echelons. I don't think so. But it makes me slightly ill to predict what the guy might have conjured up as his acerbic and athletic mind grew sharper with age. And that's what hurts the most: We have no idea what these conjurings might have been. We will never know.
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*"we" = readers, eaters, state-fair attendees, cruise-ship travelers, tennis players, mathematicians, Lynch devotees, Adult movie watchers, jesters, interviewers, hideous men, Illinoisians, Pomona grads-to-be, those with reactive sweat glands, unpretentious polyglots, bandana-aficionados, i.e., literate and up-right human beings.
Monday, November 2, 2009
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3 comments:
Interesting thoughts Jon! What I take out of the post is that when we lose another human we really lose the chance to see that person realize more of their potential.
I too regret the loss of DFW and what might have been. Our only consolation is that we may read and re-read the work he left, and think of him whenever we are confronted with a plate of lobster or a vacation on a cruise ship (and so on).
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افضل شركة تنظيف بالمدينة المنورة يقدم ارخص خدمات شركات تنظيف و غسيل شقق وفلل ومنازل بالمدينه
غسيل سجاد بالمدينه المنوره وتنظيف السجاد بالمدينه
من خدماتنا:
شركة تركيب طارد حمام بالمدينة رخيصه
شركة مكافحة الحمام بالمدينة تركيب طارد الطيور
تنظيف الشقق بالمدينة المنورة بجميع مشتملاتهامثل تنظيف الأرضيات وتنظيف الاثاث وتنظيف الحوائط والستائر والحمامات والمطابخ
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