novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- he used it in the context of a dance. [Mixed salad quotes from Although of course you end up becoming yourself: A road trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky.] So it's two in the afternoon. I've just dropped my bag on his living room carpet, which is a mess, but the mess feels hospital cornered, curated. We've addressed the two women's magazines on his counter. (David is a Cosmopolitan subscriber; he says reading "I've Cheated - Should I Tell?" a bunch of times a year is "fundamentally soothing to the nervous system.") "Boy, I remember, one reason I still don't like to call myself a writer is that I don't ever want to be mistaken for that type of person." Which didn't prepare you for the company -- which was astonishingly ample, gentle, forthcoming, overflowing. It makes sense. Books are a social substitute; you read people who, at one level, you'd like to hang out with. Chapters, pages, novels, articles are the next best thing. Even when it's just a good factual writer, you want to hang around them to get the facts, the way you'd sit next to a brainy kid at a test to copy off their answer sheet. David's writing self -- it's most pronounced in his essays -- was the best friend you'd ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style. The roommates walked the campus; crossing a green, it became the Dave Show. He would grab and imitate how people walked, talked, angled their heads, pictured their lives. "Not to mirror what they did, but to sort of capture them." The writer Mary Karr dated David in the early 1990s, when he was coming back from the worst period in his life. The ground must have still had a postconvalescent wobbliness underfoot -- but there was David, big-booted, pocketing everything, happy, a man on an information safari. "Data went into his mind, and it would just shoot off sparks. Wildly funny, unbelievable wattage, such a massive interest in and curiosity about his place in the world. He had more frames per second than the rest of us, he just never stopped. He was just constantly devouring the universe." Life is the accumulation of flukes. (A passionate belief in the reverse was what I was abandoning at the time I met David. I believed a really good person could make everything in their lives on purpose.) I ended up on this story because Jann Wenner, the vigorous man who owns the magazine I work for, happened to open The New York Times to a photo of David. In early 1996, David's picture had become an everywhere fact: the tiny box, the tilted head with bandanna, stubble, long hair. "Oh," Jann said. "He's one of us. Send Lipsky." I'm thirty years old, he's thirty-four. We both have long hair. When you meet someone for the first time, they mostly seem a perfect ambassador for their job. It's the impossible remarks that carry and strand a person in specificity. In our talks, you see me always giving the wised-up, padded-shoulder advice. Endorse the check, take the deal, get seconds, put your feet up. This was the payroll doctrine eight years of my life had trained me to spread. David keeps talking about the largest things, I keep countering with the smallest. It's like a younger brother trying to impress an older one with the rough schooling he's picked up in the lower grades. I think it was on the airplane that I finally relaxed. OK, he was quicker than me -- also funnier than me. I could enjoy him and quit trying to match him. I think he did in the car, by the Henry Ford road-trip equation: two men will become comfortable if they have to travel any distance in excess of forty miles. We seem not to be moving at all, and the conversation is the best one I've ever had. We cover everything. David's life was harder than I would have guessed. It was smarter. I recognized it, it was different from mine; every area of it was completely occupied by feeling. Neither of us knows where our lives are going to go, we're both trying to decide who we'll be at various points of arrival. We talk about what matters to any person. There are things he said to me that shifted my life, that joined my talk show, that are in the list of quotes I recite to myself. Give me twenty-four hours alone, and I can be really, really smart. What he guessed about my own personality. David thought books existed to stop you from feeling lonely. Franzen said a sad, moving thing to me. He said losing David had been like watching a science fiction movie, when a small figure gets sucked out of the airlock. An abrupt, absolute, quiet disappearance. John Updike -- and you're about to watch or have watched already us argue like crazy about John Updike -- once wrote that temporariness, the nature of things being provisional, shouldn't disqualify them. He wrote -- another of the lines that's stuck on shuffle in my brain, and plays at odd, uplifting moments -- that "all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds." 11:35 pm - 10.13.10 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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