the following is a passage from page 694 of david foster wallace's novel--and my current hobby--Infinite Jest. i'm genuinely not sure how much sense it will make without knowing the book, but i figured it was worth a try. someone may get something out of it. but if you don't know the context, don't read too much into the political aspects. i think this resounds with me largely because i currently live in a country where people rarely show emotion or sentiment (in my experience.) but i do think he also speaks to an american generation that i absolutely grew up in and am part of. but it may not be only in the US. it really makes me wonder about why, though. why do we--young, old, american, japanese, whoever--so fear ourselves?
"We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naivete on this continent...[and] naivete is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America....[It's] about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive. Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic... One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pulls and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia."
2 comments:
For me, reading Wallace is like looking at a masterpiece of art and crying for some reason I cannot understand. There's some kind of beauty hidden in the words that I can't comprehend cognitively, but my soul understands completely.
"the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete."
I've never met him, never spoken to him, and I dont' think I've ever even scratched the surface of understanding anything he's ever written, but I sure miss him.
Have you ever read the introduction to "And of Course in the End you End up Becoming Yourself." It's written about his struggle with depression and his suicide. Heartbreaking. Depression is a disease.
Hi young!
are you old know.
We should be visiting such as places where is a natural environment. Deserts, valleys and other grassy fields are very useful for health and recovering for mental diseases.
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