with my eye strength considerably diminished

disclaimer:

i realize i have been talking about 'reading' and 'books'

far too often for the past month or so.

my thoughts on this subject:

a. i am in charge of this bitch, so i can do as i please;

b. what else am i supposed to do but read during this dead time;

c. as i read, i realize there are more things i want to read,

which lead to even more things i want to read,

which, ultimately, might result in some overdue fines.

i put down Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

not five minutes ago, and i wanted to reflect on it

while its "heartthrobbing" effects have yet to mellow.

considering my last impression of it will come from the very end,

let me attack it from there, which is, i think,

a major point to consider, anyhow.

i cannot be sure if DT Max deliberately used

frequent footnotes (ugh, i am beginning to hate alliteration

more and more, although from where this hate

stems from, i have no idea)

to parallel David Foster Wallace's writing,

or he did so because it was the most convenient method

to relay the information at hand.

regardless, i used two bookmarks while attempting to

devour this "325 page behemoth"

(trust me, i did not at first realize that

it would take me four separate days to read this thing,

and Max makes you work for these 325 measly pages;

i do not like to boast, but this is coming from the guy

that read the final Harry Potter in under 10 hours.

then again, quis est Harry Potter?)

one for the place i was in the biography,

and one for the place i was in the footnotes.

all of my feeble-minded troubles aside,

it seemed very much like being the co-pilot

of an airplane you knew was about to crash,

but the other pilot did not,

because you were the only one with the fuel gauge

on the instrument panel.

as the footnotes plummeted in number,

finally whittling down to none in the last chapter,

i had not even the chance to come to terms with

what i knew was inevitable.

that in itself is quite a "chicken or the egg" conundrum:

even though i knew the whole time reading

what the end was going to be,

the tale kept me entranced just enough to float me,

a loan shark digging his claws ever deeper into

my emotional bank, knowing the final balance would go his way.

that was why the end felt so abrupt and two-sided,

the biography portion finally merging unceremoniously

with the footnote portion at the end of Wallace's life.

another intriguing aspect of the narrative

was how vast and giants-trampling-little-villages-esque

the preceding years of Wallace's life were treated as,

and how it compared to the little last-breath

of his death in the final four pages or so.

it may have been that Max knew,

along with Wallace, The Pale King was stagnant

in the way that only Wallace could stagnate himself;

although Wallace's depression was what ultimately

drove him to suicide, there was no progression for him

with his novel, and that made it difficult for Max

to progress the narrative as well,
effectively forcing him to end at the grotesquely,
paradoxically organic end.

Wallace went off of his medication and barely gave himself

a chance to cope, instead withdrawing

and focusing on the chasm his unfinished novel brought into his life

(that is not to say that there was a reason for his death;

depression, and its symptoms, manifestations, etc., is something

no person ever feels the same as another,

and especially at the level that Wallace felt,

no one could ever begin to imagine.

therefore, to attribute blame to his inability to work

would be misguided.

i am hesitant to say that i have experienced

this kind of depression, but i have experienced

a pain so immobile and disruptive that

the ending of my life seemed to me a rational solution.

i realize i digress, but i cannot stress enough

how important this point is:

even if the pain of his absence lingers in the heart

of those who loved him, and even those remotely grazed

by his writing, which could be seen as the ultimate

extension of himself as a person,

no one can truly step into his world and realize

why he did what he did, and we can never begin

to fully comprehend the darkness that took him).

in this cycle of self-agony, Max really had nothing

to show the reader, because ultimately, he cannot feel

as Wallace did, and thus he cannot analyze,

let alone empathize, for the reader.

picture the mother snake

of the famous ouroboros:

she knows her child is destined to devour itself,

and so cannot attempt to feed it any further,

allowing the facts of her universe to plant even further.

i write late into the night,

and i have so many things on my mind regarding this book.

i am unsure as to whether or not i will ever get to

a full analysis of everything else that i have gleaned from

studying a facet of Wallace's life.

all i can say is that it made me look hard at myself,

and question the feelings and motive for feelings

that i find myself having constantly.

i, as Wallace did, fear the recursive nature

of trying to be a good person,

and trying more than that to be a whole person.

i am not saying that he and i were very alike,

but that there are similarities that made me

feel an aching connection with his troubled life

(that is literal, by the way, that aching connection.

sometimes my body manifests emotions physically,

making my heart press and my stomach twist,

beads of sweat gathering by my unreadable palm lines.

it is not something i can control, trust me,

but sometimes it can be interesting).