If you've talked to me lately I've probably babbled at you about David Foster Wallace's 1996 opus Infinite Jest and how shockingly amazing it is. I'm re-reading it and I'm up to page 128 of its 981-excluding-footnotes pages. Because I'm actually this obnoxious and the book is actually that amazing, I'm going to proceed to quote a couple of completely non-representative passages at you, one because I love the dialogue and one because it made me giggle in quite an undignified fashion. Enjoy! Or not! See if I care!


(Hugh Steeply is an intelligence agent under the aegis of the O.N.A.N. [Organization of North American Nations, a new pan-NA government] Bureau of Unspecified Services. Remy Marathe is a triple-agent, belonging to the particularly-dreaded Wheelchair Assasins Quebecois-separatist terrorist group, who he is pretending to pretend to betray, hence actually betraying, to secure advanced medical care for his wife, who is suffering from advanced ventricular restenosis -- a disease virtually unheard of before the Continental Reconfiguration.)

"Divided loyalties are one thing. But if he does it for love -- well then you've got a kind of tragic element that transcends the political. wouldn't you say?" Steeply smiled broadly down at Marathe.
"Tragic saying as if Rodney Tine of Nonspecificity were not responsible for choosing it, as the insane are not responsible," said Marathe quietly.
...
Marathe had settled back on his bottom in the chair. "Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, 'fanatic,' do they teach you it comes from the Latin for 'temple'? It is meaning, literally, 'worshipper at the temple.'"
"Oh Jesus now here we go again," Steeply said.
"As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine's great love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith."
Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. "Herrrrrre we go."
Marathe ignored this. "Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticisim with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you."
"How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?"
"You U.S.A.'s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for. Love of a woman, the sexual, it bends back in on the self, makes you narrow, maybe crazy. Choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart. Something bigger than the self."
Steeply laid a hand between his misdirected breasts. "Ohh ... Canada....."
Marathe leaned again forward on his stumps. "Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would die without thinking for what?"
...
Marathe said, "This, is it not the choice of the most supreme importance? Who teaches your U.S.A children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?"
"This from a man who --"
Marathe was willing that his voice not rise. "For this choice determines all else. No? All other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple. What is the temple, thus, for U.S.A.'s? What is it, when you fear that you must protect them from themselves, if wicked Quebecers conspire to bring the Entertainment into their warm homes?"
Steeply's face had assumed the openly twisted sneering expression which he knew well Quebecers found repellent on Americans. "But you assume it's always choice, conscious, decision. This isn't just a little naive, Remy? You sit down with your little accountant's ledger and soberly decide what to love? Always?"
"The alternatives are --"
"What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?"
Marathe's sniff held disdain. "Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self's sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself."
A silence ensued this.
Marathe shifted in his chair. "In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free. The most pathetic of bondage. Not tragic. No songs. You believe you would die twice for another but in trugh would die only for your alone self, its sentiment."

==

(Hal Incandenza is an adolescent ranked junior tennis player at the Enfield Tennis Academy in fictional Enfield, Mass, which is somewhere between East Newton and Allston. He is a "big sibb"-type person for several younger players.)

"We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness."
"E Unibus Pluram," Ingersoll muses.
Hal looks from face to face. Ingersoll's face is completely devoid of eyebrows and is round and dustily freckled, not unlike a Mrs. Clarke pancake. "So how can we also be together? How can we be friends? How can Ingersoll root for Arslanian in Idris's singles at the Port Washington thing when if Idris loses Ingersoll gets to challenge for his spot again?"
"I do not require his root, for I am ready." Arslanian bares canines.
"Well that's the whole point. How can we be friends? Even if we all live and eat and shower and play together, how can we keep from being 136 deeply alone people all jammed together?"
"You're talking about community. This is a community-spiel."
"I think alienation," Arslanian says, rolling the profile over to signify he's talking to Ingersoll. "Existential individuality, frequently referred to in the West. Solipsism." His upper lip goes up and down over his teeth.
Hal says, "In a nutshell, what we're talking about here is loneliness."
Blott looks about ready to cry. Beak's palsied eyes and little limb-spasms signify a troubling dream. Blott rubs his nose furiously with the heel of his hand.
"I miss my dog," Ingersoll concedes.
"Ah." Hal rolls onto one elboy to hike a finger into the air. "Ah. But then so notice the instant group-cohesion that formed itself around all the pissing and moaning down there why don't you. Blott. You, Kent. This was your question. The what looks like sadism, the skeletal stress, the fatigue. The suffering unites us. They want to let us sit around and bitch. Together. After a bad PM set we all, however briefly, get to feel we have a common enemy. This is their gift to us. Their medicine. Nothing brings you together like a common enemy."
"Mr. deLint."
"Dr. Tavis. Schtitt."
"DeLint. Watson. Nwangi. Thode. All Schtitt's henchmen and henchwomen."
"I hate them!" Blott cries out.
"And you've been here this long and you still think this hatred's an accident?"
"Purchase a clue Kent Blott!" Arslanian says.
"The large and economy-size clue, Blott," Ingersoll chimes.
Beak sits up and says "God no not with pliers!" and collapses back again, again with the spit-bubble.
...
Hal some weeks back had acquiesced to Lyle's diagnosis that Hal finds Ingersoll -- this smart soft caustic kid, with a big soft eyebrowless face and unwrinkled thumb-joints, with the runty, cuddled look of a Mama's boy from way back, a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some impression of himself -- that the kid so repels Hal because Hal sees in the kid certain parts of himself he can't or won't accept. None of this ever occurs to Hal when Ingersoll's in the room. He wishes him ill.

that is all goodnight!