That's an idea to which he would return in his writing, piercing the absurdities of contemporary culture yet also seeking something deeper, the core connection to which literature aspires. This is the ambiguity, the complexity, that transfigures his best writing, although clearly, these were issues he could not resolve.
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Thoughtful advice
In 2005, Wallace gave a commencement address at Kenyon College in Ohio that has been widely circulated in classrooms and on the Internet. In that speech, he told the graduating seniors: "[I]t is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head." Up until this week, I would have said that those were words to live by, but in Wallace's case, perhaps, the opposite was true.
Rather than a repudiation, this just makes his work seem all the more urgent, especially the promise that "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."
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david.ulin@latimes.com. David L. Ulin is book editor of The Times.
