It’s strange how society works. We fetishize the dead, having birthed the idea that art is somehow immortalized by the death of its creator, creating a sort of platform of romance to fill the void that great artists leave behind, irrespective of whether these figures would have wanted to be put on such a pedestal. The pedestal built for late writer David Foster Wallace is one of the truly unfortunate ones and as a admittedly selfish appreciator, I wish I had had the opportunity to read his work while he was alive. For an author who expressed many reservations about idealization, it feels wrong to romanticize him, especially as a young reader discovering him as he rises in stature within the mainstream literary community. But as a young reader
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As a kid, they were often elaborate affairs that expanded in imagination until they collapsed under their own weight. As I grew up and I started to feel an urge to write, I found little inspiration in the young adult novels of my peers, my stories were never about kids. I yearned for something more until I stumbled into the world of literature in middle school; soon I was reading the Iliad as fast as my classmates read Percy Jackson. Classics gave me hope that my writing might matter someday and, perhaps more powerful, a sense of superiority over my peers that pushed me further. This validation stuck and when I found a friend’s unread copy of Infinite Jest at the start of 11th grade, its length hooked me in. Here was another tome I could wave around and if nobody knew what it was, all the better. As it turned out, I loved it. Immediately, the style, the subject matter, the complicated web of plot and character, all spoke to my natural instincts. Even more, words had an urgent importance, like he feared they would fade from his mind at any moment and he simply had to get every thought down on paper. It was massive and insane and it felt like something that with time, skill, and perseverance I might done …show more content…
Of course it never works like that; to attempt to replicate uniqueness is self-defeating. The temptation to do so arises from insecurities, fears that I couldn’t create something like that independently. After all, for ever David Foster Wallace there are hundreds of thousands of bargain bin authors that nobody could care less about, probability would indicate I’m most likely not bound for greatness, despite how intelligent I might think I am. Furthermore, it's truly terrifying to consider the implications of having the ability to do something great but never harnessing it. Yet, Wallace struggled with these same doubts and misgivings: much of his work discusses the dangers of expectations, fame, self-consciousness in modern society. He himself continually denied descriptions of genius and cultural spokesmanship, instead insisting upon his normality, that he was just an intelligent, but relatively average person who liked to work
As a kid, they were often elaborate affairs that expanded in imagination until they collapsed under their own weight. As I grew up and I started to feel an urge to write, I found little inspiration in the young adult novels of my peers, my stories were never about kids. I yearned for something more until I stumbled into the world of literature in middle school; soon I was reading the Iliad as fast as my classmates read Percy Jackson. Classics gave me hope that my writing might matter someday and, perhaps more powerful, a sense of superiority over my peers that pushed me further. This validation stuck and when I found a friend’s unread copy of Infinite Jest at the start of 11th grade, its length hooked me in. Here was another tome I could wave around and if nobody knew what it was, all the better. As it turned out, I loved it. Immediately, the style, the subject matter, the complicated web of plot and character, all spoke to my natural instincts. Even more, words had an urgent importance, like he feared they would fade from his mind at any moment and he simply had to get every thought down on paper. It was massive and insane and it felt like something that with time, skill, and perseverance I might done …show more content…
Of course it never works like that; to attempt to replicate uniqueness is self-defeating. The temptation to do so arises from insecurities, fears that I couldn’t create something like that independently. After all, for ever David Foster Wallace there are hundreds of thousands of bargain bin authors that nobody could care less about, probability would indicate I’m most likely not bound for greatness, despite how intelligent I might think I am. Furthermore, it's truly terrifying to consider the implications of having the ability to do something great but never harnessing it. Yet, Wallace struggled with these same doubts and misgivings: much of his work discusses the dangers of expectations, fame, self-consciousness in modern society. He himself continually denied descriptions of genius and cultural spokesmanship, instead insisting upon his normality, that he was just an intelligent, but relatively average person who liked to work