Sharing: David Foster Wallace
Posted on September 14, 2008
I don’t think it’s an accident that luxury cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but like fiftyish people for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the ship were in various stages of disintegration. And the ocean itself turns out to be one enormous engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing speed—rusts them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships’ hulls with barnacles and kelp and a vague and ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate. We saw some real horrors in port, local boats that looked as if they had been dipped in a mixture of acid and shit, scabbed with rust and goo, ravaged by what they float in.
Not so the megalines. It’s no accident they’re so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decayaction of the sea. Our ship, The Nadir, seemed to have a whole battalion of wiry little third world guys who went around the ship in navy-blue jumpsuits scanning for decay to overcome. Eventually, toward the end of the trip, I found a capstan, a type of nautical hoist (like a pulley on steroids!) with a half-dollar-sized patch of rust on the side facing the sea. My delight in this tiny flaw was interrupted by the arrival, even as I stood there, of a crewman with a roller and a bucket of white paint. I watched as he gave the entire capstan a fresh coat and walked away with a nod.
Here’s the thing: A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay. But on a luxury cruise, we are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One way to “triumph” is via the rigors of self-improvement (diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, Franklin Quest time-management seminars), to which the crew’s amphetaminic upkeep of the Nadir is an unsubtle analogue.
But there’s another way out, too: not titivation but titillation; not hard work but hard play. See in this regard the ship’s constant activities, festivities, gaiety, song; the adrenaline, the stimulation. It makes you feel vibrant, alive. It makes your existence seem non-contingent. The hard-play option promises not a transcendence of death-dread so much as just drowning it out.
The whole first two days and nights are bad weather, with high-pitched winds, heaving seas, spume lashing the portholes’ glass. For forty-plus hours it’s more like a North Sea cruise, and the staff goes around looking regretful but not apologetic, and in all fairness it’s hard to find a way to blame Celebrity Cruises, Inc. for the weather. The staff keeps urging us to enjoy the view from the railings on the lee side of the Nadir. The one other guy who joins me in trying out the non-lee side has his glasses blown off by the gale. I keep waiting to see somebody from the crew wearing the traditional yellow slicker, but no luck. The railing I do most of my contemplative gazing from is on Deck 10, so the sea is way below, slopping and heaving around, so it’s a little like looking down into a briskly flushing toilet. No fins in view.
In heavy seas, hypochondriacs are kept busy taking their gastric pulse every couple of seconds and wondering whether what they’re feeling is maybe the onset of seasickness. Seasickness-wise, though, it turns out that bad weather is sort of like battle: There’s no way to know ahead of time how you’ll react. A test of the deep and involuntary stuff of a man. I myself turn out not to get seasick. For the whole first rough-sea day, I puzzle over the fact that every other passenger on the Nadir looks to have received identical little weird shaving-cuts below his or her left ear–which in the case of female passengers seems especially strange–until I learn that these little round Band-aidish things on everybody’s neck are special new super-powered transdermal motion-sickness patches, which apparently nobody with any kind of clue about luxury cruising now leaves home without.
A lot of the passengers get seasick anyway, these first two howling days. It turns out that a seasick person really does look green, though it’s an odd and ghostly green, pasty and toadish, and more than a little corpselike when the seasick person is dressed in formal dinner wear.
For the first two nights, who’s feeling seasick and who’s not and who’s not now but was a little while ago or isn’t feeling it yet but thinks it’s maybe coming on, etc., is a big topic of conversation at Table 64 in the Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant. Discussing nausea and vomiting while eating intricately prepared gourmet foods doesn’t seem to bother anybody. Common suffering and fear of suffering turn out to be a terrific ice-breaker. Ice breakering is pretty important, because on this ship you eat at the same designated table with the same companions all week.
There are seven other people with me at good old Table 64, all from south Florida. Four know one another in private landlocked life and have requested to be at the same table. The other three people are an old couple and their granddaughter, whose name is Mona. I am the only first-time Luxury Cruiser at Table 64. With the conspicuous exception of Mona, I like all my tablemates a lot. Besides me, there are five women and two men, and both men are completely silent except on the subjects of golf, business, transdermal motion-sickness prophylaxis, and the legalities of getting stuff through customs. The women carry Table 64’s conversational ball. One of the reasons I like all these women (except Mona) so much is that they laugh really hard at my jokes, even lame or very obscure jokes, although they all have this curious way of laughing where they sort of scream before they laugh, so that for one excruciating second you can’t tell whether they’re getting ready to laugh or whether they’re seeing something hideous and screamworthy over your shoulder.
By midweek it starts to strike me that I have never before been party to such a minute and exacting analysis of the food and service of a meal I am just at that moment eating. Nothing escapes the attention of Trudy and her best friend Esther: the symmetry of the parsley sprigs atop the boiled baby carrots, the consistency of the bread, the flavor and mastication-friendliness of various cuts of meat, the celerity and flambe technique of the various pastry guys in tall white hats who appear tableside when items have to be set on fire (a major percentage of the desserts in the Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant have to be set on fire), and so on. The waiter and busboy keep circling the table, going “Finish? Finish?” while Esther and Trudy have exchanges like:
“Honey you don’t look happy with the potatoes. What’s the problem.”
“I’m fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
“Don’t lie. Honey with that face who could lie? Frank, am I right? This is a person with a face incapable of lying.”
“There’s nothing wrong Esther darling, I swear it.”
“You’re not happy with the conch.”
“All right. I’ve got a problem with the conch.”
“Did I tell you? Frank, did I tell her? Frank silently probes his ear with pinkie. “Was I right? Trudy I could tell just by looking you weren’t happy.”
“I’m fine with the potatoes. It’s the conch.”
“Did I tell you about seasonal fish on ships? What did I tell you?”
“The potatoes are good.”
Mona is eighteen. Her grandparents have been taking her on a Luxury Cruise every spring since she was five. Mona always sleeps through both breakfast and lunch and spends all night at the Scorpio Disco and in the Mayfair Casino playing the slots. She is six two if she’s an inch. She’s going to attend Penn State next fall, because the agreement is that she’ll receive a four-wheel-drive vehicle if she goes someplace where there might be snow. She is unabashed in recounting this college-selection criterion. She is an incredibly demanding passenger and diner, but her complaints about slight aesthetic and gustatory imperfections lack Trudy and Esther’s discernment and come off as simply churlish. Mona is also kind of strange-looking: a body like Brigitte Nielsen or some centerfold on steroids, and above it, framed in resplendent blond hair, the tiny unhappy face of a kind of corrupt doll.
Her grandparents, who retire every night right after supper, always make a small ceremony after dessert of handing Mona $100 to go have some fun with. This $100 bill is always in one of those little ceremonial bank envelopes that has Franklin’s face staring out of a porthole-like window in the front, and written on the envelope in red Magic Marker is always “We Love You, Honey.”
Mona never once says thank you. She also rolls her eyes at just about everything her grandparents say, a habit that very quickly drives me up the wall.
Mona’s special customary gig is to lie to the waiter and maitre d’ and say that Thursday is her birthday, so that at the formal supper on Thursday she gets bunting and a heart-shaped helium balloon tied to her chair, and her own cake, and pretty much the whole restaurant staff comes out and forms a circle around her and sings to her. Her real birthday, she informs me on Monday, is July 29, and when I quietly observe that July 29 is also the birthday of Benito Mussolini, Mona’s grandmother shoots me kind of a death-look, although Mona herself is excited at the coincidence, apparently confusing the names Mussolini and Maserati.
For me, at the end, I find myself in my plush seat, going farther and farther away, sort of creatively visualizing an epiphanic moment; trying to see the ship itself with the eyes of someone not aboard, imagining the Nadir right at this moment, all lit up and steaming north, in the dark, at night, with a strong west wind pulling the moon backward through a skein of clouds—the Nadir a constellation, complexly aglow, angelically white, festive, imperial. It would look like a floating palace to any poor soul out here on the ocean at night, alone in a dinghy, or not even in a dinghy but simply and terribly floating, treading water, out of sight of land.
This deep dissociative trance lasted all through the next day and night. This period I spent entirely in Cabin 1009, in bed, mostly looking out the spotless porthole, with trays and rinds all around me, feeling a little bit dulled but mostly good—good to be on the Nadir and good to know that soon I would get off the ship, that I had survived (in a way) being pampered to death (in a way)—and so I stayed in bed.
And even though the trance made me miss the final night’s talent show and midnight farewell buffet and Saturday’s docking (at which there was apparently even more crepe and waving and explosive goodwill) reentry into the stresses and demands of quotidian landlocked real-world life wasn’t nearly as bad as a week of absolutely nothing had led me to fear.
David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. He was best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest” which Time Magazine put on its list of 100 Best English Language novels. At the time of his death, David taught English at Pomona College. He was 46.
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As someone in the “cruise business” I found Mr Wallace’s essay a bit over the top. Nonetheless, it was fun to read. Your editing of his originally very long essay is masterful.
It’s just so sad to have lost him. Infinitely sad.
Steve Almond-boston Globe on Mr. Wallace:
But Wallace’s real subject is what he calls “a very modern and American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe” is bogus, “that there’s nothing left anywhere but sales and salesmen.”
This is the crucial question of our historical moment: whether our citizens can rise above their doubts and anxieties and express a genuine idealism. And it’s the very reason we should mourn Wallace’s death. He was one of the few popular writers who threw himself into the maw of American life and challenged the reflexive cynicism he found there. He was a moralist of astonishing clarity and hope.
“It would probably be better to call our own arts culture now one of congenital skepticism,” he wrote, in his appreciation of Fyodor Dostoevsky. “Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.”
“For me,” he observed, “the really striking, inspiring thing about Dostoevsky isn’t just that he was a genius; he was also brave. He never stopped worrying about his literary reputation, but he also never stopped promulgating unfashionable stuff in which he believed. And he did this not by ignoring (now aka ‘transcending’ or ’subverting’) the unfriendly cultural circumstances in which he was writing, but by confronting them, engaging them, specifically and by name.”
Wallace deserves the same praise. His death shouldn’t just provoke sorrow, but distress. We have lost one of our most powerful imaginations, a man whose works provided us a means of rescue.
Steve Almond’s new book of essays is “(Not that You Asked).”
Interview with David Wallace in 1996:
What do you think is uniquely magical about fiction?
Oh, Lordy, that could take a whole day! Well, the first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don’t know what you’re thinking or what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way. But that’s just the first level, because the idea of mental or emotional intimacy with a character is a delusion or a contrivance that’s set up through art by the writer. There’s another level that a piece of fiction is a conversation. There’s a relationship set up between the reader and the writer that’s very strange and very complicated and hard to talk about. A really great piece of fiction for me may or may not take me away and make me forget that I’m sitting in a chair. There’s real commercial stuff can do that, and a riveting plot can do that, but it doesn’t make me feel less lonely.
There’s a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone — intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.
When I saw his Obituary in the New York Times, and all the articles then, I did not have the time to read them. Now, in reading here, I am beginning to see why David was special.
I think the problem of not enough time for the meaningful part of Life is the real cancer of our time.
Cancer of the mind and spirit, not the body, is what we really need to deal with. How few humans really do find that space within themselves to observe and comment on our mutual and individual “condition” in meaningful ways!
I’ll honor David Foster Wallace by reading more of his brilliant mind’s works.
For those that suffer depression on David’s level there are possible ways of getting better and not all are found at the pharmacy. If you know somebody that suffers like that, spend some time at MAPS and read the literature there.
Even MDMA (Ecstasy) can lift depression. Peyote rituals can help. Psylocybin mushrooms or yage/ ayahuasca rituals. Many plants can help.
Even ammino acids can help L-tryptophan or SAMe.
and of course cannabis(marijuana) can help depression.