I think the joke is on us. I hope DFW is laughing in heaven.
I’ll save this, though, for a final post.
Today, I write from page 306. Most recently, Orin has
abandoned tennis for football; Poor Tony has had a seizure when going through
withdrawal. I’m thinking there is a connection, though I’m reaching and
reaching and reaching. . . Though I may not trust DFW with editing, I trust him
with significance. The prose, ever meaningful, must be about time, about
existing?
Orin finds both football and Joelle (who will later—chillingly—do
something that I found, for whatever reason, a real slap in the face to
existence: she will enter a Store 24 on the cusp of committing suicide, she
will buy a soda, she will go outside, and she will pour it down the drain).
Orin discovers football, and “. . . both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps
illustrate an individual person’s basic powerlessness over the really
meaningful events in his life i.e. almost nothing important happens to you
happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans
trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such rush
to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.”
Orin’s love language might be affirmation, which sucks—always needing, always, always: when he plays “. . . a lot of it seemed emotional and/or even, if
there was such a thing anymore, spiritual: a denial of silence: here were
upwards of 30,00 voices, souls, voicing approval as One Soul.” And: “Orin said
the thing he thought he liked was he literally could not hear himself think out
there . . .”
Move to Poor Tony going through drug withdrawal: “He weighed
fifty kilos and his skin was the color of summer squash. . . He had a sty that
had scraped one eyeball as pink as a bunny’s.” But, like Orin, there is cosmic
epiphany: “Time began to take on new aspects for him, now, as Withdrawal progressed.
Time began to pass with sharp edges. . . Nothing in even Poor Tony’s grim
life-experience prepared him for the experience of time with a shape and odor .
. .” With withdrawal, “he understood . . . the phrase chilled to the bone—shard-studded columns of chill entering to fill
his bones with ground glass . . .” and he feels “the pain of his breath against
his teeth. . .”
Oh, Time! “Time spread him and entered him roughly and had
its way and left him again in the form of endless gushing liquid shit that he
could not flush enough to keep up with. . . Then at some point he realized:
time had become the shit itself: Poor Tony had become an hourglass: time moved
through him now; he ceased to exist apart from its jagged-edged flow.”
I think of DFW now writing this high-definition, detailed, meta-,
mega-novel about over-thinking addicts seeking refuge from their own brains and
I wince with both charm and disgust.
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