11th
David Foster Wallace, from his notes for his unfinished novel, The Pale King, as quoted in last week’s New Yorker profile on DFW
A lot of people have been musing on DFW since this profile was published, about his genius and how genius can drive some people to the unstable side of their mental faculties. And yes, I’ve been thinking about that too, and about hefty opuses and the literary company one keeps (I mean, DFW corresponded with Jonathan Franzen and Don Delillo on the regular. It makes sense. In the New Yorker the week before, Ian McEwan was besties with Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens. For a real think, compare and contrast McEwan’s profile to DFW’s, and then ponder Nabokov’s and McEwan’s shared interest in Lepidopterology, and then maybe consider for a moment the separation of authors’ lives and their works, as in Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot.. but I digress and digress and digress…)
But I’ve been thinking about cataloging. DFW’s unfinished novel is about IRS agents and boredom, and the joy and freedom that can come with working past boredom without leaving the moment. It’s kind of a Kierkegaardian idea. Once you stare boredom in the face, once you look down that big cliff into a dark abyss and think, I am going to be here for a very long time, once you accept and even embrace the dullness, you mind can go to the most extraordinary places and even find bliss. That’s one of the appeals of cataloging, other than the internal, eternal need to label and index and categorize everything. Maybe the trippiness inherent in cataloging is partially why catalogers are often thought to be bonkers. Borges was a cataloger, after all.
DFW was thinking of pulling a quote from the prose poem “Borges and I” by Frank Bidart for the book’s epigraph: “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.” Cataloging at it’s purest.
