I learned a lot of things from David Foster Wallace — the main one being that I wasn’t going to be him. Even now that he has “passed on”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15wallace.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin my feeling is not so much that the niche he occupied is now empty, but more along the lines that it has been abolished — lots of too-smart kids who came of age in the late nineties aspired to produce a certain fin-de-siecle slacker prose style, but somehow it seemed that only DFW could extrude endless lengths of prose that was both as finely made as watch guts but yet also writen in a way which made it kind of like you might also expect to find on a rack by the beef jerky and smokes on the way to the checkout counter at Your Generic Minimart. So as it happened I ended up being merely derivative of DFW, which is another way of saying I learned a lot from him: I learned that it is ok to capitalize words like Your Generic Minimary and but like to also not be afraid to ramble, as long as that rambling had its own secretly constructed grammatical integrity. But perhaps the thing that I learned the most from DFW, the thing that I’m trying to shake off even to this day even though has already has shaken it off (or didn’t, depending on your point of view) is Obsession, and what comes after.

I read Infinite Jest in a small metal house seven thousand plus feet above sea level in West Enga — an area that even its greatest supporters would admit lacks the cosmopolitan charms of Central Enga, which is really saying something. Wrestling with the thousand page monster was my way of engaging in the time honored tradition of anthropological field research that those of us in the know call “Hiding From Your Fieldsite By Staying Indoors And Reading.” I brought it with me without knowing what I was getting myself into — I had a buddy who liked it ok, and I figured that with the nearest book store an eight hour bus ride away, I didn’t want to have to run resupplies too often. And so I decided it would be a good idea to take it to the field, even if that did mean lugging what was essentially a small log half-way across the world.

The blurb on the back cover of Infinite Jest enthuses that it is “the best book of 1996”, which I imagine was cold comfort to DFW. Put that much work into something, I figure, and you hope that it will be the best book of 1996 and the first couple of months of 1997 at least. It was a terrible book: ostentatiously unfinished, full of exasperating footnotes, patience-trying, and ambitious to the point of hubris. But it was also terrible in the sense that Ivan The Terrible was in the sense of whatever the original world is in Russian that gets translated as ‘terrible’ but could also mean ‘awesome’: over time as I read through its picaresque, riotous post-Nirvana pre-9/11 pages the thing that spoke to me most was not despair or the misanthropy bred by idealism or any of the other things that I’ve seen people talk about in the DFW obits — it was obsession.

Obsession haunts the pages of Infinite Jest. That burning drive to connect with something or somebody, so much so that the world seems less and less like a place where you live with people and more and more like something that gets in the way. The most extreme example is Infinite Jest itself, a video so compelling that it puts viewers into a fixated, vegetative state forever. But the most paradigmatic are actually the people at NA, drug addicts who are so fixated on their substances that even their attempts to quit take the form of compulsive, repetitive meditations on their problems. In between we have the child-athletes at ETA who live in a hothouse atmosphere which demands excellence in athletics and academics, the sanitation-obsessed President of ONAN, and others. All of these people — like DFW himself, one presumes — struggle to find a life filled with meaning and purpose… but not too much.

All of this made a great deal of sense to me as I read it in Porgera — a place where I got eight hours of direct light a day and shivered through the rain and the mud and the rest of it while the rest of my friends in graduate school studied the concept of hybridity amongst Parisian intellectuals and bravely bore crosses as traumatic as choosing between Burgundy and Bordeaux at dinner. My fieldwork was rough, and it made me think seriously about having given up a bunch of opportunities that could have come my way so that I could earn a Ph.D. and then do, uh, something with it.

For most of my academic career obsession had been my number one trope. I came from the Heroin Chic school of academic commitment — real dedication meant a real nihilism, a readiness to keep on doing until you couldn’t do any more, a longing-for and hankering-after whose logical demanded self-obviation. Those people who slept eight hours a night and watched TV and had loved ones and all that were obviously suckers.

Obsession like this is a form of narcissism, I think. It’s tremendously comforting because it keeps you from having to deal with that 90% of your life that you’ve convinced yourself doesn’t matter. But my field work on gold (obsessional element par excellence), as well as some of the stuff I encountered in the field (armed robbery, cars almost plunging off of cliffs, and so forth) gave me a strong sense of my mortality that made me question just how hip it was to throw it all away. In that context, the characters and themes of Infinite Jest provided a road map of possible futures of supposedly fun things that it seemed increasingly likely I wouldn’t do again.

In the end I found my own way just fine, and my Velvet Underground mindset aged into a milder constellation of ideas like commitment and answerability. For one thing, I began advising graduate students, who aren’t very motivated by being told that the key to success is unhealthy, narrow-minded living. I am still a big fan of obsession — but (I tell myself, and others) in a tempered way. I was gobsmacked to read the sections of The Craftsman where Sennett discusses the way that obsession deforms work when it stops being answerable to the material at hand, and when it turns inwards rather than turns outward and engages with others. In his hands, obsession became a less desperate master.

And so it was that just recently these I began to feel like a particular chapter in my intellectual biography had been closed, and its problematics shelved. I actually just purchased a copy of Infinite Jest not too long ago, thinking that it might be fun to read now that it didn’t burn a hole in my heart, and had been downgraded only to a sort of warm glow.

And then DFW closed a chapter in his biography, too. DFW was depressed — terribly, primally so. It was his depression that got him, not my obsession. But he played a role in who I was and am, even if he didn’t know it. I feel that I owe him something — even if it is only these words. He leaves us now to grapple with our own thematics.