…this evening to the greatest American author of our generation, David Foster Wallace, who died by his own hand at 46.

He’ll be remembered most for Infinite Jest, his thousand-page epic novel of PoPoMo reconstructivism and recursive complexity, about (among many other things) drugs-as-entertainment and entertainment-as-drugs, set amid a near-future North America in perhaps-inexorable political and environmental decline.

But that was only the cap of a remarkable body of works, fiction and non-, whose common thread was the hyper-rigorous parsing of a scene or a topic down to the most minute detail, the most obscure angle; all treated with a dry humor AND sincere compassion.

Wallace was no hipper-than-thou alt-cult celeb. His stories and essays, even when about his personal experiences (including past struggles with drugs and alcohol), always dealt with more universal conditions.

This Metafilter thread is one way to learn more about this.

Perhaps his most direct worldview-statement is his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon University. Towards its end, he states:

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.