Sad news from California, DFW decided 46 years was enough. I wonder what had made him so depressed. Writer’s block, addiction, a bad relationship? I’m sure it will emerge. Too bad.

…………….
21/9 from
David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst.

In response to a question about what being an American was like for him at the end of the 20th century, he told the online magazine Salon in 1996 that there was something sad about it, but not as a reaction to the news or current events. “It’s more like a stomach-level sadness,” he said. “I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.”

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

An interesting quotation from DFW’s OBLIVION:

David Foster Wallace Dead « The Edge of the American West

Thoughts on suicide from a man who’s already committed it, in Oblivion’s “Good Old Neon”:

I simply said, without going into anything like the level of detail
I’ve given you (because my purpose in the letter was of course very
different), that I was killing myself because I was an essentially
fraudulent person who seemed to lack either the character or the
firepower to find a way to stop even after I’d realized my fraudulence
and the terrible toll it exacted . . . I also inserted that there was
also a good possibility that, when all was said and done, I was nothing
but another fact-track yuppie who couldn’t love, and that I found the
banality of this unendurable, largely because I was evidently so hollow
and insecure that I had a pathological need to see myself as somehow
exceptional or outstanding at all times. Without going into much
explanation or argument, I also told Fern that if her initial reaction
to these reasons for my killing myself was to think I was being much,
much too hard on myself, then she should know that I was already aware
that that was the most likely reaction my note would produce in her,
and had probably deliberately constructed the note to at least in part
prompt just that reaction, just the way my whole life I’d often said
and done things designed to prompt certain people to believe that I was
a genuinely outstanding person whose personal standards were so high
that he was far too hard on himself, which in turn made me appear
attractively modest and unsmug, and was a big reason for my popularity
with so many people in all different avenues of my life . . .” (173)

And from Gawker:

…but as his 2005 speech at Kenyon College implied, he was not unfamiliar with the heft of existence:

[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about

The fear of not connecting is picked up by David Gates writing in Newsweek:

But Wallace found both artistic and moral value in simply registering his dread: “Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience . . . We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.” He once argued that the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein—one of the most terrifying thinkers who ever lived—was an artist because “he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.”

Some journalism:
Roger Federer as Religious Experience in The NY Times
Profile of John McCain in Rolling Stone
DFW review of Updike in the New York Observer
DFW Journalism published in Harper’s Magazine

Remembrances posted at McSweeney’s
Joshua Ferris on DFW in the Observer
Sam Leith in one of the Telegraph blogs.
Some good links in another Telegraph piece by Tim Martin.
Including:
Wyatt Mason review of Oblivion in the LRB
Writers remember DFW in Slate Magazine

Last word to DFW – on writing: