I am young and confused and obsessed with certain problems that I think right now distill the experience of being human.
david foster wallace, in a letter to gerald howard, his editor at penguin; excerpted in d. t. max’s gently probing postmortem in the new yorker. max, who himself just missed being a contemporary of wallace’s on the harvard campus, touches on but ultimately shies away from a question that’s been nagging me: why did so many of us think wallace’s work was so great, yet at the same time feel so unfulfilled by his extant corpus? by what mechanics did we all – and i’m confident there were a great many of us – pick up on the staggering enormity of his promise, while realising that he had not yet written his best work?
i am young and confused and obsessed
david foster wallace, in a letter to gerald howard, his editor at penguin; excerpted in d. t. max’s gently probing postmortem in the new yorker. max, who himself just missed being a contemporary of wallace’s on the harvard campus, touches on but ultimately shies away from a question that’s been nagging me: why did so many of us think wallace’s work was so great, yet at the same time feel so unfulfilled by his extant corpus? by what mechanics did we all – and i’m confident there were a great many of us – pick up on the staggering enormity of his promise, while realising that he had not yet written his best work?