David Foster Wallace committed suicide about a week ago. This is sad, if not entirely unprecedented. He was a towering talent, and, in memoriam, lots of his writings have begun springing up online. They're worth digging up—the man could dance with the English language.
One article in particular got me thinking: Federer as Religious Experience, published August 20, 2006 in the New York times. Obviously it's full of great, Wallacian sentences like these:
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.
And these:
He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.
And even (my favorite) these:
Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.
Sitting in my chair, reading these words on my computer screen, I realized that I was enjoying a fundamentally different experience from all the other reading I've done in this position.
Think about it this way. The internet is still a fundamentally text-based medium. I worked it out once, and I consume between fifty and a hundred pages of printed text per day off the internet every day, factoring in news, blogs, RSS feeds, and everything else. And that's exactly what it is: consumption. The words come in, the ideas come out, and I move on. Almost none of it really sticks.
But reading this article, written by a real honest-to-God gifted-to-the-sky writer, I realized that I've been doing the equivalent of consuming a thousand calories per day of Powerbars. Sure, it'll keep you alive, and even give you most of the energy/information/whatever that you need, but it's a fundamentally joyless experience. It's more about the end product, what you learned, what you can do with it, rather than the reading itself.
The internet makes it very easy to passively acquire information, to let it pass through us like so much water. And it is crucial to note that this is fine. Water is necessary for life, and, let's be honest, it would be exhausting to wade through an article like this one every time we wanted to find out what's going on in the world. But the English language is capable of so much more than this. In the hands of a master like Wallace, it can be made to turn backflips. The water can become a tidal wave and sweep us off to some wild and new island full of wonders we could never imagine on our own. It can requires our whole brain to parse it, grab us by the eyes and show us something new. And I'm concerned that, in the word-flood of the modern internet, the occurrence of such works is becoming rarer and rarer. After all, it's much easier to bang out a blog post (irony duly noted) or, heaven forfend, a Twitter than it is to put the blood and effort into really writing something.
So I find myself reconsidering all of those daily RSS feeds and newsposts and things. If I trim some of those out, I'll have more time to read things like this. And while I may know less, in some quantitative sense, I'll have acquired something less tangible, but ultimately more real (at least in terms of sticking in my memory).
And I am left wondering: These days, has our increased ability to know somehow come at the cost of our ability to be?

