旅程终点

成也孤独，败也孤独

如果说《旅程终点》（The End of the Tour 2015)是一部话唠电影，那它也是一部值得深入思考的话唠电影。在我看来，本片更像是介绍作家戴维（David Foster Wallace）的传记片，它引导我们思考这样的问题：戴维以自己的孤独排解了我们的孤独，为何终究他又选择了死亡？我们不妨依据滚石记者与作家戴维之间的对话来对一问题稍作分析。

如果说一个人选择死亡是因为痛苦，那么，戴维可能是因什么样的痛苦，才走上轻生的道路呢？戴维当年凭他那本畅销书《无尽的玩笑》虽已声名鹊起，但名利并非他写作的主要目的，甚至，巨大名利让他更感到孤独。他把写作比作抚养小孩，必须非常小心，他说：“可以为自己的作品自豪，但期望从中得利就不好了。”利用声名获得利益似乎是一种潜规则，戴维在跟记者初次谈话中就嘲笑了这一点，他开玩笑地说，他很想利用新书巡回宣传吸引女性的投怀送抱，然而，他真实的想法却是“还好，我没这么干，那只会令我感到寂寞”，因为在他看来，别人只是看上了他的声名，而非他的作品和他本人。他不仅不想从自己书籍的成功当中获利，甚至他无法跟任何人分享成功的喜悦，这可能是声名带给他的更大痛苦。

他向记者解释了他想利用声名吸引女性的真实意图：“我只是觉得如果可以跟人分享这些美好的事情会很棒。”然而，他却无法做到这一点，首先，他无法跟普通朋友分享这一切，因为来找他的人都有自己的生活要操心，都是带着目的而来的；其次，他的工作特点让他身边无法留住亲近的人，他的工作特点是写作时需要独处，在他看来，一旦“全情投入”便会有非常强的“自我意识”，这种意识会让任何身边的人成为“被利用的对象”，这不仅让身边的人不能忍受，也是他不愿意去做的。因此，他只能感叹：“如果有个人可以跟你共同生活，分担一切该有多好，无论是开心还是困惑，面对着她你都可以放得开。”可见，有成功却无法与人分享喜悦，应当是他痛苦的一个来源，否则他不会跟记者着重解释这件事。当然，既然喜悦都找不到人分享，那痛苦就更找不到人来分担了。

“成功”无法给他带来快乐，还有一个重要原因是他可能本质上就是个悲观的人。他向记者解释他曾完全迷失在写作当中，因而酗酒、乱性，甚至想到死，然而，当他小说畅销，记者都认为他的新书备受赞誉，非常不赖时，他却说“这是很好，可这是虚幻的。”试想，昔日的龌龊都不足以让他为今天的成功感到喜悦，他那里还能找到幸福呢？

如果说他写作并非为了名利，那他真实目的是什么呢？他跟记者说起他那本畅销书的主题，就是探讨人性的孤独。从这场对话中，我们能够看出，他的痛苦源自他的人文情怀，他那种想为人性孤独提供解决方案的高尚情怀。对于人性孤独，他说“我拿不出一个诊断方案或一套药方来解决”，然而，他又非常担忧技术对人生幸福的不利影响，他认为技术手段如同“打手枪”，偶尔为之会带来欢愉，但决不能长期依赖，技术的进步也绝不是解决人性孤独的良方。可见，人性孤独的问题他已无法解决，如果他是个以解决人类的前途和命运为己任的人，他就注定是孤独而痛苦的。

此外，他的痛苦还来自他注定的“与众不同”。因为他的才华、成就，的确让他显得比别人聪明，在记者看来，他的“交际策略”都利用了他的“聪明”，然而，他不仅不认可这一点，反而说“那让我感到有点孤单”。他这样讲应当是发自内心的，因为他从小就因父母是搞学术的，而使他感到自己与其他同学“格格不入”。他痛恨这种与众不同所带来的孤独感，因为他的信念告诉他，一位优秀的作家必须“珍惜普通人的一面”。他辩驳道：“如果我只扫上一眼，就默认人家没什么见识，或者人家的内在不如我丰富、复杂、嗅觉敏锐，我就不会是这么个好作家。”所以，他认为自己说“只是个普通人”，绝不是一种“惺惺作态”。然而，他又怎么可能成为一个“普通人”呢？正如记者所反驳的，别人啃你一本长达千页的书怎么可能是因为“作者是个普通人”呢？

现实与幻像的反差也是加重他孤独感的一个渊源。虽然他自己有着很强的幻灭感，觉得万事皆空，甚至认为这种幻灭感根植于人性，但他还是在意那些他所批判的幻像，比如影像宣传，他认为这类东西很容易让我们“拐离有意义的人生”，既然一切皆虚幻，又何必太在意呢？一旦在意了，孤独必会如影随形。从他和记者最后的对话中，我们分明能看出这一点：“我必须从这些关注中抽离出来，因为那些关注就像是给你的大脑皮层来了针海洛因，我真正需要勇气的地方是得静坐在那里，承受住这种抽离，并且努力提醒自己什么才是现实。现实就是：我，34岁，独自呆在房间里，面对着一张纸头。”他无法在形形色色的幻象世界中体会快乐，又不愿在冰冷的现实中忍受孤独，这种性格特点就注定了他痛苦人生。

从以上分析可知，他成功无人分享，痛苦无人分担，孤独终究是无法排解的，当他二十来岁时发生过“心灵危机”再次发生时，而恰好此时根深蒂固的幻灭感又占据他整个的心灵时，死亡必然让他感受到是一种解脱。显然，如果说是孤独成就了戴维，也是孤独感最后毁了他，那么，用“成也孤独，败也孤独”来概括戴维的一生应当是恰当的。（文/石板栽花 2015年10月26日）

PS.本文引文源自“酷炫秃顶富二代字幕组” koala676所翻译的字幕，特此志谢！

“人们不会去看一个普通人写的1000页的书，他们想去看，因为他们知道作者是个天才。所以你他妈是在骗谁？”

“我几年后再和你讨论这个问题。你不会想成为我。”

“未来的生活或许会变的很享受、很便利，只需要购买即可，但提供它们的人都是些不爱你的人。等到那一天，或许你还活着，但你真的已经死了。”

虽然所有人都视成功为终点，社会本体就是个奔向成功的巨大体系，它如此根深蒂固的植入于所有人的内心，以至于不可撼动。华莱士在《无尽的玩笑》之前，又何尝没写过成百上千页纸？那些不能给他换得一点名气，然而在有一天，他成为了真正所谓的名人，登上了山的顶峰，但顶峰的风景是什么样呢？其实什么也没有。

华莱士觉得社会犯了一个巨大的错误，现实的成功无法解决一个人本质的问题和矛盾。在忙碌的发布会、签名会，一场场party，一次次恭维之后，还是一个三十四岁的单身汉，陪伴的只有一张空白的纸。

成功无法解决孤单，这或许听起来很厚颜无耻，华莱士说出口的时候，也是满脸尴尬。他何尝没有机会利用名气换取物质享受、sex，但那只会更加孤独，越是进入体系，就越是孤独。

但没有成功时呢？作家不会感到痛苦，自尊心受损吗？自然会。但那时你还在体系里，还视成功为一切，对畅销书、最棒的作品充满着幻想和憧憬。不知道自己花上多少年才能达到那个顶峰，然而等你一路攀爬，在商业运作下蓦然成为顶峰的人时，却发现自己以前劝说自己前进的原理不管用了，最棒的作品在哪里？

小黑屋里有的只是单身汉、社会的压力，和一张始终空白的纸页。

在这个社会上，提供给你一切便利的、给予你一切成就感的，都是些不爱你的人。成功与否，都无法摆脱这份强烈的孤独感。

生活的便利有什么用？我要离开地球，去火星生活。

In case anyone needs to read it.

source:
http://kurtrudder.blogspot.jp/2009/01/lost-years-last-days-of-david-foster.html

issue:
1064 Rolling Stone, Oct. 30, 2008

autour:
David Lipsky

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace
He was the greatest writer of his generation - and also its most tormented. In the wake of his tragic suicide, his friends and family reveal the lifelong struggle of a beautiful mind

by David Lipsky

He was six-feet-two, and on a good day he weighed 200 pounds. He wore granny glasses with a head scarf, points knotted at the back, a look that was both pirate-like and housewife-ish. He always wore his hair long. He had dark eyes, soft voice, caveman chin, a lovely, peak-lipped mouth that was his best feature. He walked with an ex-athlete's saunter, a roll from the heels, as if anything physical was a pleasure. David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." He wanted to write "stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live." Readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style: his comedy, his brilliance, his humaneness.

His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California's Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.

"The one thing that really should be said about David Foster Wallace is that this was a once-in-a-century talent," says his friend and former editor Colin Harrison. "We may never see a guy like this again in our lifetimes — that I will shout out. He was like a comet flying by at ground level."

His 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, was Bible-size and spawned books of interpretation and commentary, like Understanding David Foster Wallace — a book his friends might have tried to write and would have lined up to buy. He was clinically depressed for decades, information he limited to family and his closest friends. "I don't think that he ever lost the feeling that there was something shameful about this," his father says. "His instinct was to hide it."

After he died on September 12th, readers crowded the Web with tributes to his generosity, his intelligence. "But he wasn't Saint Dave," says Jonathan Franzen, Wallace's best friend and the author of The Corrections. "This is the paradox of Dave: The closer you get, the darker the picture, but the more genuinely lovable he was. It was only when you knew him better that you had a true appreciation of what a heroic struggle it was for him not merely to get along in the world, but to produce wonderful writing."

David grew up in Champaign, Illinois. His father, Jim, taught philosophy at the University of Illinois. His mother, Sally, taught English at a local community college. It was an academic household — poised, considerate — language games in the car, the rooms tidy, the bookcase the hero. "I have these weird early memories," Wallace told me during a series of interviews in 1996. "I remember my parents reading Ulysses out loud to each other in bed, holding hands and both lovin' something really fiercely." Sally hated to get angry — it took her days to recover from a shout. So the family developed a sort of interoffice conflict mail. When his mother had something stern to say, she'd write it up in a letter. When David wanted something badly — raised allowance, more liberal bedtime — he'd slide a letter under his parents' door.

David was one of those eerie, perfect combinations of two parents' skills. The titles of his father's books — Ethical Norms, Particular Cases — have the sound of Wallace short-story titles. The tone of his mother's speaking voice contains echoes of Wallace's writing voice: Her textbook, Practically Painless English, sounds like a Wallace joke. She uses phrases like "perishing hot" for very hot, "snoof" for talking in your sleep, "heave your skeleton" for go to bed. "David and I both owe a huge debt to my mother," says his sister, Amy, two years younger. "She has a way of talking that I've never heard anywhere else."

David was, from an early age, "very fragile," as he put it. He loved TV, and would get incredibly excited watching a program like Batman or The Wild Wild West. (His parents rationed the "rough" shows. One per week.) David could memorize whole shows of dialogue and predict, like a kind of plot weatherman, when the story was going to turn, where characters would end up. No one saw or treated him as a genius, but at age 14, when he asked what his father did, Jim sat David down and walked him through a Socratic dialogue. "I was astonished by how sophisticated his understanding was," Jim says. "At that point, I figured out that he really, really was extraordinarily bright."

David was a big-built kid; he played football — quarterback — until he was 12 or 13, and would always speak like an athlete, the disappearing G's, "wudn't," "dudn't" and "idn't" and "sumpin'." "The big thing I was when I was little was a really serious jock," Wallace told me. "I mean, I had no artistic ambition. I played citywide football. And I was really good. Then I got to junior high, and there were two guys in the city who were better quarterbacks than me. And people started hitting each other a lot harder, and I discovered that I didn't really love to hit people. That was a huge disappointment." After his first day of football practice at Urbana High School, he came home and chucked it. He offered two explanations to his parents: They expected him to practice every day, and the coaches did too much cursing.

He had also picked up a racket. "I discovered tennis on my own," Wallace said, "taking public-park lessons. For five years, I was seriously gonna be a pro tennis player. I didn't look that good, but I was almost impossible to beat. I know that sounds arrogant. It's true." On court, he was a bit of a hustler: Before a match, he'd tell his opponent, "Thank you for being here, but you're just going to cream me."

By the time he was 14, he felt he could have made nationals. "Really be in the junior show. But just at the point it became important to me, I began to choke. The more scared you get, the worse you play." Plus it was the Seventies — Pink Floyd, bongs. "I started to smoke a lot of pot when I was 15 or 16, and it's hard to train." He laughed. "You don't have that much energy."

It was around this time that the Wallaces noticed something strange about David. He would voice surprising requests, like wanting to paint his bedroom black. He was constantly angry at his sister. When he was 16, he refused to go to her birthday party. "Why would I want to celebrate her birthday?" he told his parents.

"David began to have anxiety attacks in high school," his father recalls. "I noticed the symptoms, but I was just so unsophisticated about these matters. The depression seemed to take the form of an evil spirit that just haunted David." Sally came to call it the "black hole with teeth." David withdrew. "He spent a lot of time throwing up junior year," his sister remembers. One wall of his bedroom was lined with cork, for magazine photos of tennis stars. David pinned an article about Kafka to the wall, with the headline THE DISEASE WAS LIFE ITSELF.

"I hated seeing those words," his sister tells me, and starts to cry. "They seemed to sum up his existence. We couldn't understand why he was acting the way he was, and so of course my parents were exasperated, lovingly exasperated."

David graduated high school with perfect grades. Whatever his personal hurricane was, it had scattered trees and moved on. He decided to go to Amherst, which is where his father had gone, too. His parents told him he would enjoy the Berkshire autumn. Instead, he missed home — the farms and flat horizons, roads stretching contentedly nowhere. "It's fall," David wrote back. "The mountains are pretty, but the landscape isn't beautiful the way Illinois is."

Wallace had lugged his bags into Amherst the fall of 1980 — Reagan coming in, the Seventies capsized, preppies everywhere. He brought a suit to campus. "It was kind of a Sears suit, with this Scotch-plaid tie," says his college roommate and close friend Mark Costello, who went on to become a successful novelist himself. "Guys who went to Amherst, who came from five prep schools, they always dress a notch down. No one's bringing a suit. That was just the Wallace sense that going East is a big deal, and you have to not embarrass us. My first impression was that he was really very out of step."

Costello came from working-class Massachusetts, seven kids, Irish-Catholic household. He and Wallace connected. "Neither of us fit into the Gatsby-ite mold," Costello says. At Amherst David perfected the style he would wear for the rest of his life: turtleneck, hoodie, big basketball shoes. The look of parking-lot kids who in Illinois were called Dirt Bombs. "A slightly tough, slightly waste-product-y, tennis-playing persona," Costello says. Wallace was also amazingly fast and good company, even just on a walk across campus. "I'd always wanted to be an impressionist," Wallace said, "but I just didn't have an agile enough vocal and facial register to do it." Crossing a green, it was The Dave Show. He would recount how people walked, talked, held their heads, pictured their lives. "Just very connected to people," Costello recalls. "Dave had this ability to be inside someone else's skin."

Observing people from afar, of course, can be a way of avoiding them up close. "I was a complete just total banzai weenie studier in college," Wallace recalled. "I was really just scared of people. For instance, I would brave the TV pit — the central TV room — to watch Hill Street Blues, 'cause that was a really important show to me."

One afternoon, April of sophomore year, Costello came back to the dorm they shared and found Wallace seated in his chair. Desk clean, bags packed, even his typewriter, which weighed as much as the clothes put together.

"Dave, what's going on?" Costello asked.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," Wallace said. "I know I'm really screwing you."

He was pulling out of college. Costello drove him to the airport. "He wasn't able to talk about it," Costello recalls. "He was crying, he was mortified. Panicky. He couldn't control his thoughts. It was mental incontinence, the equivalent of wetting his pants."

"I wasn't very happy there," Wallace told me later. "I felt kind of inadequate. There was a lot of stuff I wanted to read that wasn't part of any class. And Mom and Dad were just totally cool."

Wallace went home to hospitalization, explanations to his parents, a job. For a while, he drove a school bus. "Here he was, a guy who was really shaky, kind of Holden Caulfield, driving a school bus through lightning storms," Costello recalls. "He wrote me a letter all outraged, about the poor screening procedures for school-bus drivers in central Illinois."

Wallace would visit his dad's philosophy classes. "The classes would turn into a dialogue between David and me," his father remembers. "The students would just sit looking around, 'Who is this guy?' " Wallace devoured novels — "pretty much everything I've read was read during that year." He also told his parents how he'd felt at school. "He would talk about just being very sad, and lonely," Sally says. "It didn't have anything to do with being loved. He just was very lonely inside himself."

He returned to Amherst in the fall, to room with Costello, shaky but hardened. "Certain things had been destroyed in his head," Costello says. "In the first half of his Amherst career, he was trying to be a regular person. He was on the debate team, the sort of guy who knows he's going to be a success." Wallace had talked about going into politics; Costello recalls him joking, "No one is going to vote for somebody who's been in a nuthouse." Having his life fall apart narrowed his sense of what his options were — and the possibilities that were left became more real to him. In a letter to Costello, he wrote, "I want to write books that people will read 100 years from now."

Back at school junior year, he never talked much about his breakdown. "It was embarrassing and personal," Costello says. "A zone of no jokes." Wallace regarded it as a failure, something he should have been able to control. He routinized his life. He'd be the first tray at the dining hall for supper, he'd eat, drink coffee dipped with tea bags, library study till 11, head back to the room, turn on Hawaii Five-O, then a midnight gulp from a scotch bottle. When he couldn't turn his mind off, he'd say, "You know what? I think this is a two-shot night," slam another and sleep.

In 1984, Costello left for Yale Law School; Wallace was alone senior year. He double-majored — English and philosophy, which meant two big writing projects. In philosophy, he took on modal logic. "It looked really hard, and I was really scared about it," he said. "So I thought I'd do this kind of jaunty, hundred-page novel." He wrote it in five months, and it clocked in at 700 pages. He called it The Broom of the System.

Wallace published stories in the Amherst literary magazine. One was about depression and a tricyclic anti-anxiety medication he had been on for two months. The medication "made me feel like I was stoned and in hell," he told me. The story dealt with the in-hell parts:

You are the sickness yourself.... You realize all this...when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts.... When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly.

It wasn't just writing the novel that made Wallace realize his future would lie in fiction. He also helped out friends by writing their papers. In a comic book, this would be his origin story, the part where he's bombarded with gamma rays, bitten by the spider. "I remember realizing at the time, 'Man, I'm really good at this. I'm a weird kind of forger. I can sound kind of like anybody.' "

Grad school was next. Philosophy would be an obvious choice. "My dad would have limbs removed without anesthetic before ever pushing his kids about anything," Wallace said. "But I knew I was gonna have to go to grad school. I applied to these English programs instead, and I didn't tell anybody. Writing The Broom of the System, I felt like I was using 97 percent of me, whereas philosophy was using 50 percent."

After Amherst, Wallace went to the University of Arizona for an MFA. It was where he picked up the bandanna: "I started wearing them in Tucson because it was a hundred degrees all the time, and I would perspire so much I would drip on the page." The woman he was dating thought the bandanna was a wise move. "She was like a Sixties lady, a Sufi Muslim. She said there were various chakras, and one of the big ones she called the spout hole, at the very top of your cranium. Then I began thinking about the phrase 'Keeping your head together.' It makes me feel kind of creepy that people view it as a trademark or something — it's more a recognition of a weakness, which is that I'm just kind of worried that my head's gonna explode."

Arizona was a strange experience: the first classrooms where people weren't happy to see him. He wanted to write the way he wanted to write — funny and overstuffed and nonlinear and strange. The teachers were all "hardass realists." That was the first problem. Problem two was Wallace. "I think I was kind of a prick," he said. "I was just unteachable. I had that look — 'If there were any justice, I'd be teaching this class' — that makes you want to slap a student." One of his stories, "Here and There," went on to win a 1989 O. Henry Prize after it was published in a literary magazine. When he turned it in to his professor, he received a chilly note back: "I hope this isn't representative of the work you're hoping to do for us. We'd hate to lose you."

"What I hated was how disingenuous it was," Wallace recalled. "'We'd hate to lose you.' You know, if you're gonna threaten, say that."

Wallace sent his thesis project out to agents. He got a lot of letters back: "Best of luck in your janitorial career." Bonnie Nadell was 25, working a first job at San Francisco's Frederick Hill Agency. She opened a letter from Wallace, read a chapter from his book. "I loved it so much," Nadell says. It turned out there was a writer named David Rains Wallace. Hill and Nadell agreed that David should insert his mother's maiden name, which is how he became David Foster Wallace. She remained his agent for the rest of his life. "I have this thing, the nearest Jewish mother, I will simply put my arms around her skirt and just attach myself," Wallace said. "I don't know what it means. Maybe sort of WASP deprivation."

Viking won the auction for the novel, "with something like a handful of trading stamps." Word spread; professors turned nice. "I went from borderline ready-to-get-kicked-out to all these tight-smiled guys being, 'Glad to see you, we're proud of you, you'll have to come over for dinner.' It was so delicious: I felt kind of embarrassed for them, they didn't even have integrity about their hatred."

Wallace went to New York to meet his editor, Gerry Howard, wearing a U2 T-shirt. "He seemed like a very young 24," Howard says. The shirt impressed him. "U2 wasn't really huge then. And there's a hypersincerity to U2, which I think David was in tune with — or that he really wanted to be sincere, even though his brain kept turning him in the direction of the ironic." Wallace kept calling Howard — who was only 36 — "Mr. Howard," never "Gerry." It would become his business style: a kind of mock formality. People often suspected it was a put-on. What it was was Midwestern politeness, the burnout in the parking lot still nodding "sir" to the vice principal. "There was kind of this hum of superintelligence behind the 'aw, shucks' manner," Howard recalls.

The Broom of the System was published in January of 1987, Wallace's second and last year at Arizona. The title referred to something his mother's grandmother used to say, as in, "Here, Sally, have an apple, it's the broom of the system." "I wasn't aware David had picked up on that," his mother says. "I was thrilled that a family expression became the title of his book."

The novel hit. "Everything you could hope for," Howard says. "Critics praised it, it sold quite well, and David was off to the races."

His first brush with fame was a kind of gateway experience. Wallace would open The Wall Street Journal, see his face transmuted into a dot-cartoon. "Some article like 'Hotshot's Weird New Novel,' " he said. "I'd feel really good, really cool, for exactly 10 seconds. Probably not unlike a crack high, you know? I was living an incredibly American life: 'Boy, if I could just achieve X, Y and Z, everything would be OK.' " Howard bought Wallace's second book, Girl With Curious Hair, a collection of the stories he was finishing up at Arizona. But something in Wallace worried him. "I have never encountered a mind like David's," he says. "It functioned at such an amazingly high level, he clearly lived in a hyperalert state. But on the other hand, I felt that David's emotional life lagged far behind his mental life. And I think he could get lost in the gap between the two."

Wallace was already drifting into the gap. He won a Whiting Writers' Award — stood on a stage with Eudora Welty — graduated Arizona, went to an artists' colony, met famous writers, knew the famous writers were seeing his name in more magazines ("absolutely exhilarating and really scary at the same time"), finished the stories. And then he was out of ideas. He tried to write in a cabin in Tucson for a while, then returned home to write — Mom and Dad doing the grocery shopping. He accepted a one-year slot teaching philosophy at Amherst, which was strange: Sophomores he had known were now his students. In the acknowledgments for the book he was completing, he thanks "The Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Fund for Aimless Children."

He was balled up, tied up. "I started hating everything I did," he said. "Worse than stuff I'd done in college. Hopelessly confused, unbelievably bad. I was really in a panic, I didn't think I was going to be able to write anymore. And I got this idea: I'd flourished in an academic environment — my first two books had sort of been written under professors." He applied to graduate programs in philosophy, thinking he could write fiction in his spare time. Harvard offered a full scholarship. The last thing he needed to reproduce his college years was to reactivate Mark Costello.

"So he comes up with this whole cockamamie plan," Costello recalls. "He says, 'OK, you're going to go back to Boston, practice law, and I'm going to go to Harvard. We'll live together — it'll be just like the house we had at Amherst.' It all ended up being a train wreck."

They found an apartment in Somerville. Student ghetto: rickety buildings, outdoor staircases. Costello would come home with his briefcase, click up the back stairs, David would call out, "Hi, honey, how was your day?" But Wallace wasn't writing fiction. He had thought course work would be a sideline; but professors expected actual work.

Not writing was the kind of symptom that presents a problem of its own. "He could get himself into places where he was pretty helpless," Costello says. "Basically it was the same symptoms all along: this incredible sense of inadequacy, panic. He once said to me that he wanted to write to shut up the babble in his head. He said when you're writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices. The ones that are saying, 'You're not good enough, you're a fraud.' "

"Harvard was just unbelievably bleak," Wallace said. It became a substance marathon: drinking, parties, drugs. "I didn't want to feel it," he said. "It was the only time in my life that I'd gone to bars, picked up women I didn't know." Then for weeks, he would quit drinking, start mornings with a 10-mile run. "You know, this kind of very American sports training — I will fix this by taking radical action." Schwarzenegger voice: "If there's a problem, I will train myself out of it. I will work harder."

Various delays were holding up the publication of his short-story collection Girl With Curious Hair. He started to feel spooked. "I'm this genius writer," he remembered. "Everything I do's gotta be ingenious, blah, blah, blah, blah." The five-year clock was ticking again. He'd played football for five years. Then he'd played high-level tennis for five years. Now he'd been writing for five years. "What I saw was, 'Jesus, it's the same thing all over again.' I'd started late, showed tremendous promise — and the minute I felt the implications of that promise, it caved in. Because see, by this time, my ego's all invested in the writing. It's the only thing I've gotten food pellets from the universe for. So I feel trapped: 'Uh-oh, my five years is up, I've gotta move on.' But I didn't want to move on."

Costello watched while Wallace slipped into a depressive crisis. "He was hanging out with women who were pretty heavily into drugs — that was kind of alluring to Dave — skanking around Somerville, drinking himself blotto."

It was the worst period Wallace had ever gone through. "It may have been what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis," he said. "It was just feeling as though every axiom of your life turned out to be false. And there was nothing, and you were nothing — it was all a delusion. But you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn't function."

By November, the anxieties had become locked and fixed. "I got really worried I was going to kill myself. And I knew, that if anybody was fated to fuck up a suicide attempt, it was me." He walked across campus to Health Services and told a psychiatrist, "Look, there's this issue. I don't feel real safe."

"It was a big deal for me, because I was so embarrassed," Wallace said. "But it was the first time I ever treated myself like I was worth something."

By making his announcement, Wallace had activated a protocol: Police were notified, he had to withdraw from school. He was sent to McLean, which, as psychiatric hospitals go, is pedigreed: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton all put in residences there; it's the setting for the memoir Girl, Interrupted. Wallace spent his first day on suicide watch. Locked ward, pink room, no furniture, drain in the floor, observation slot in the door. "When that happens to you," David said, smiling, "you get unprecedentedly willing to examine other alternatives for how to live."

Wallace spent eight days in McLean. He was diagnosed as a clinical depressive and was prescribed a drug, called Nardil, developed in the 1950s. He would have to take it from then on. "We had a brief, maybe three-minute audience with the psychopharmacologist," his mother says. Wallace would have to quit drinking, and there was a long list of foods — certain cheeses, pickles, cured meats — he would have to stay away from.

He started to clean up. He found a way to get sober, worked very hard at it, and wouldn't drink for the rest of his life. Girl With Curious Hair finally appeared in 1989. Wallace gave a reading in Cambridge; 13 people showed up, including a schizophrenic woman who shrieked all the way through his performance. "The book's coming out seemed like a kind of shrill, jagged laugh from the universe, this thing sort of lingering behind me like a really nasty fart."

What followed was a phased, deliberate return to the world. He worked as a security guard, morning shift, at Lotus Software. Polyester uniform, service baton, walking the corridors. "I liked it because I didn't have to think," he said. "Then I quit for the incredibly brave reason that I got tired of getting up so early in the morning."

Next, he worked at a health club in Auburndale, Massachusetts. "Very chichi," he said. "They called me something other than a towel boy, but I was in effect a towel boy. I'm sitting there, and who should walk in to get their towel but Michael Ryan. Now, Michael Ryan had received a Whiting Writers' Award the same year I had. So I see this guy that I'd been up on the fucking rostrum with, having Eudora Welty give us this prize. It's two years later — it's the only time I've literally dived under something. He came in, and I pretended not very subtly to slip, and lay facedown, and didn't respond. I left that day, and I didn't go back."

He wrote Bonnie Nadell a letter; he was done with writing. That wasn't exactly her first concern. "I was worried he wasn't going to survive," she says. He filled in Howard, too. "I contemplated the circumstance that the best young writer in America was handing out towels in a health club," Howard says. "How fucking sad."

Wallace met Jonathan Franzen in the most natural way for an author: as a fan. He sent Franzen a nice letter about his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City. Franzen wrote back, they arranged to meet in Cambridge. "He just flaked," Franzen recalls. "He didn't show up. That was a fairly substance-filled period of his life."

By April of 1992, both were ready for a change. They loaded Franzen's car and headed for Syracuse to scout apartments. Franzen needed "somewhere to relocate with my wife where we could both afford to live and not have anyone tell us how screwed up our marriage was." Wallace's need was simpler: cheap space, for writing. He had been researching for months, haunting rehab facilities and halfway houses, taking quiet note of voices and stories, people who had fallen into the gaps like him. "I got very assertive research- and finagle-wise," he said. "I spent hundreds of hours at three halfway houses. It turned out you could just sit in the living room — nobody is as gregarious as somebody who has recently stopped using drugs."

He and Franzen talked a lot about what writing should be for. "We had this feeling that fiction ought to be good for something," Franzen says. "Basically, we decided it was to combat loneliness." They would talk about lots of Wallace's ideas, which could abruptly sharpen into self-criticism. "I remember this being a frequent topic of conversation," Franzen says, "his notion of not having an authentic self. Of being just quick enough to construct a pleasing self for whomever he was talking to. I see now he wasn't just being funny — there was something genuinely compromised in David. At the time I thought, 'Wow, he's even more self-conscious than I am.' "

Wallace spent a year writing in Syracuse. "I lived in an apartment that was seriously the size of the foyer of an average house. I really liked it. There were so many books, you couldn't move around. When I'd want to write, I'd have to put all the stuff from the desk on the bed, and when I'd want to sleep, I would have to put all the stuff on the desk."

Wallace worked longhand, pages piling up. "You look at the clock and seven hours have passed and your hand is cramped," Wallace said. He'd have pens he considered hot — cheap Bic ballpoints, like batters have bats that are hot. A pen that was hot he called the orgasm pen.

In the summer of 1993, he took an academic job 50 miles from his parents, at Illinois State University at Normal. The book was three-quarters done. Based on the first unruly stack of pages, Nadell had been able to sell it to Little, Brown. He had put his whole life into it — tennis, and depression, and stoner afternoons, and the precipice of rehab, and all the hours spent with Amy watching TV. The plot motor is a movie called Infinite Jest, so soothing and perfect it's impossible to switch off: You watch until you sink into your chair, spill your bladder, starve, die. "If the book's about anything," he said, "it's about the question of why am I watching so much shit? It's not about the shit. It's about me: Why am I doing it? The original title was A Failed Entertainment, and the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn't work" — characters developing and scattering, chapters disordered — "because what entertainment ultimately leads to is 'Infinite Jest,' that's the star it's steering by."

Wallace held classes in his house, students nudging aside books like Compendium of Drug Therapy and The Emergence of the French Art Film, making jokes about Mount Manuscript, David's pile of novel. He had finished and collected the three years of drafts, and finally sat down and typed the whole thing. Wallace didn't really type; he input the giant thing twice, with one finger. "But a really fast finger."

It came to almost 1,700 pages. "I was just terrified how long it would end up being," he said. Wallace told his editor it would be a good beach book, in the sense that people could use it for shade.

It can take a year to edit a book, re-edit it, print it, publicize it, ship it, the writer all the time checking his watch. In the meantime, Wallace turned to nonfiction. Two pieces, published in Harper's, would become some of the most famous pieces of journalism of the past decade and a half.

Colin Harrison, Wallace's editor at Harper's, had the idea to outfit him with a notebook and push him into perfectly American places — the Illinois State Fair, a Caribbean cruise. It would soak up the side of Wallace that was always on, always measuring himself. "There would be Dave the mimic, Dave the people-watcher," Costello says. "Asking him to actually report could get stressful and weird and complicated. Colin had this stroke of genius about what to do with David. It was a much simpler solution than anyone ever thought."

In the pieces, Wallace invented a style writers have plundered for a decade. The unedited camera, the feed before the director in the van starts making choices and cuts. The voice was humane, a big, kind brain tripping over its own lumps. "The Harper's pieces were me peeling back my skull," Wallace said. "You know, welcome to my mind for 20 pages, see through my eyes, here's pretty much all the French curls and crazy circles. The trick was to have it be honest but also interesting — because most of our thoughts aren't all that interesting. To be honest with a motive." He laughed. "There's a certain persona created, that's a little stupider and schmuckier than I am."

The cruise-ship piece ran in January 1996, a month before David's novel was published. People photocopied it, faxed it to each other, read it over the phone. When people tell you they're fans of David Foster Wallace, what they're often telling you is that they've read the cruise-ship piece; Wallace would make it the title essay in his first collection of journalism, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. In a way, the difference between the fiction and the nonfiction reads as the difference between Wallace's social self and his private self. The essays were endlessly charming, they were the best friend you'd ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style. Wallace's fiction, especially after Infinite Jest, would turn chilly, dark, abstract. You could imagine the author of the fiction sinking into a depression. The nonfiction writer was an impervious sun.

The novel came out in February of 1996. In New York Magazine, Walter Kirn wrote, "The competition has been obliterated. It's as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL, or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy! The novel is that colossally disruptive. And that spectacularly good." He was in Newsweek, Time, Hollywood people appeared at his readings, women batted their eyelashes, men in the back rows scowled, envied. A FedEx guy rang his bell, watched David sign for delivery, asked, "How's it feel to be famous?"

At the end of his book tour, I spent a week with David. He talked about the "greasy thrill of fame" and what it might mean to his writing. "When I was 25, I would've given a couple of digits off my non-use hand for this," he said. "I feel good, because I wanna be doing this for 40 more years, you know? So I've got to find some way to enjoy this that doesn't involve getting eaten by it."

He was astonishingly good, quick company, making you feel both wide awake and as if your shoes had been tied together. He'd say things like, "There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness." He talked about a kind of shyness that turned social life impossibly complicated. "I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the point that it makes it difficult to be around other people. For instance, if I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not because I'm too worried about whether you like me."

He said one interviewer had devoted tons of energy to the genius question. "That was his whole thing, 'Are you normal?' 'Are you normal?' I think one of the true ways I've gotten smarter is that I've realized that there are ways other people are a lot smarter than me. My biggest asset as a writer is that I'm pretty much like everybody else. The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever almost made me die."

It had been difficult, during the summer, to watch his sister get married. "I'm almost 35. I would like to get married and have kids. I haven't even started to work that shit out yet. I've come close a few times, but I tend to be interested in women that I turn out to not get along very well with. I have friends who say this is something that would be worth looking into with someone that you pay."

Wallace was always dating somebody. "There were a lot of relationships," Amy says. He dated in his imaginative life too: When I visited him, one wall was taped with a giant Alanis Morissette poster. "The Alanis Morissette obsession followed the Melanie Griffith obsession — a six-year obsession," he said. "It was preceded by something that I will tell you I got teased a lot for, which was a terrible Margaret Thatcher obsession. All through college: posters of Margaret Thatcher, and ruminations on Margaret Thatcher. Having her really enjoy something I said, leaning forward and covering my hand with hers."

He tended to date high-strung women — another symptom of his shyness. "Say what you want about them, psychotics tend to make the first move." Owning dogs was less complicated: "You don't get the feeling you're hurting their feelings all the time."

His romantic anxieties were full-spectrum, every bit of the mechanics individually examined. He told me a joke:

What does a writer say after sex?

Was it as good for me as it was for you?

"There is, in writing, a certain blend of sincerity and manipulation, of trying always to gauge what the particular effect of something is gonna be," he said. "It's a very precious asset that really needs to be turned off sometimes. My guess is that writers probably make fun, skilled, satisfactory, and seemingly considerate partners for other people. But that the experience for them is often rather lonely."

One night Wallace met the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose depression memoir, Prozac Nation, had recently been published. She thought he looked scruffy — jeans and the bandanna — and very smart. Another night, Wallace walked her home from a restaurant, sat with her in her lobby, spent some time trying to talk his way upstairs. It charmed Wurtzel: "You know, he might have had this enormous brain, but at the end of the day, he still was a guy."

Wallace and Wurtzel didn't really talk about the personal experience they had in common — depression, a substance history, consultations at McLean — but about their profession, about what to do with fame. Wallace, again, had set impossible standards for himself. "It really disturbed him, the possibility that success could taint you," she recalls. "He was very interested in purity, in the idea of authenticity — the way some people are into the idea of being cool. He had keeping it real down to a science."

When Wallace wrote her, he was still curling through the same topic. "I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I'm not one of the good ones. But then I countenance the fact that at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any integrity at all don't notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself. It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am — so where does that put me?"

Success can be as difficult to recover from as failure. "You know the tic big-league pitchers have," his mother says, "when they know that they've pitched a marvelous game — but gee, can they do it again, so they keep flexing that arm? There was some of that. Where he said, 'OK. Good, that came out well. But can I do it again?' That was the feeling I got. There was always the shadow waiting."

Wallace saw it that way too. "My big worry," he said, "is that this will just up my expectations for myself. And expectations are a very fine line. Up to a certain point they can be motivating, can be kind of a flamethrower held to your ass. Past that point they're toxic and paralyzing. I'm scared that I'll fuck up and plunge into a compressed version of what I went through before."

Mark Costello was also worried. "Work got very hard. He didn't get these gifts from God anymore, he didn't get these six-week periods where he got exactly the 120 pages he needed. So he found distraction in other places." He would get engaged, then unengaged. He would call friends: "Next weekend, Saturday, you gotta be in Rochester, Minnesota, I'm getting married." But then it would be Sunday, or the next week, and he'd have called it off.

"He almost got married a few times," Amy says. "I think what ultimately happened is he was doing it more for the other person than himself. And he realized that wasn't doing the other person any favors."

Wallace told Costello about a woman he had become involved with. "He said, 'She gets mad at me because I never want to leave the house.' 'Honey, let's go to the mall.' 'No, I want to write.' 'But you never do write.' 'But I don't know if I'm going to write. So I have to be here in case it happens.' This went on for years."

In 2000, Wallace wrote a letter to his friend Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone contributor: "I know about still having trouble with relationships. (Boy oh boy, do I.) But coming to enjoy my own company more and more — most of the time. I know about some darkness every day (and some days, it's all dark for me)." He wrote about meeting a woman, having things move too easily, deciding against it. "I think whatever the pull is for me is largely composed of wanting the Big Yes, of wanting someone else to want you (Cheap Trick lives). . . . So now I don't know what to do. Probably nothing, which seems to be the Sign that the universe or its CEO is sending me."

In the summer of 2001, Wallace relocated to Claremont, California, to become the Roy Edward Disney Chair in Creative Writing, at Pomona College. He published stories and essays, but was having trouble with his work. After he reported on John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign for this magazine, he wrote his agent that it would show his editor that "I'm still capable of good work (my own insecurities, I know)."

Wallace had received a MacArthur "genius" award in 1997. "I don't think it did him any favors," says Franzen. "It conferred the mantle of 'genius' on him, which he had of course craved and sought and thought was his due. But I think he felt, 'Now I have to be even smarter.' " In late 2001, Costello called Wallace. "He was talking about how hard the writing was. And I said, lightheartedly, 'Dave, you're a genius.' Meaning, people aren't going to forget about you. You're not going to wind up in a Wendy's. He said, 'All that makes me think is that I've fooled you, too.'"

Wallace met Karen Green a few months after moving to Claremont. Green, a painter, admired David's work. It was a sort of artistic exchange, an inter-disciplinary blind date. "She wanted to do some paintings based on some of David's stories," his mother says. "They had a mutual friend, and she thought she would ask permission."

"He was totally gaga," Wright recalls. "He called, head over heels, he was talking about her as a life-changing event." Franzen met Green the following year. "I felt in about three minutes that he'd finally found somebody who was up to the task of living with Dave. She's beautiful, incredibly strong, and a real grown-up — she had a center that was not about landing the genius Dave Wallace."

They made their debut as a couple with Wallace's parents in July 2003, attending the Maine culinary festival that would provide the title for his last book, Consider the Lobster. "They were both so quick," his father says. "They would get things and look at each other and laugh, without having to say what had struck them as funny." The next year, Wallace and Green flew to his parents' home in Illinois, where they were married two days after Christmas. It was a surprise wedding. David told his mother he wanted to take the family to what he called a "high-gussy" lunch. Sally Wallace assumed it was Karen's influence. "David does not do high gussy," she says. "His notion of high gussy is maybe long pants instead of shorts or a T-shirt with two holes instead of 18." Green and Wallace left the house early to "run errands," while Amy figured out a pretext to get their parents to the courthouse on the way to the lunch. "We went upstairs," Sally says, "and saw Karen with a bouquet, and David dressed up with a flower in his buttonhole, and we knew. He just looked so happy, just radiating happiness." Their reception was at an Urbana restaurant. "As we left in the snow," Sally says, "David and Karen were walking away from us. He wanted us to take pictures, and Jim did. David was jumping in the air and clicking his heels. That became the wedding announcement."

According to Wallace's family and friends, the last six years — until the final one — were the best of his life. The marriage was happy, university life good, Karen and David had two dogs, Warner and Bella, they bought a lovely house. "Dave in a real house," Franzen says, laughing, "with real furniture and real style."

To Franzen's eye, he was watching Wallace grow up. There had been in David a kind of purposeful avoidance of the normal. Once, they'd gone to a literary party in the city. They walked in the front door together, but by the time Franzen got to the kitchen, he realized Wallace had disappeared. "I went back and proceeded to search the whole place," Franzen recalled. "He had walked into the bathroom to lose me, then turned on his heels and walked right back out the front door."

Now, that sort of thing had stopped. "He had reason to hope," Franzen said. "He had the resources to be more grown-up, a wholer person."

And then there were the dogs. "He had a predilection for dogs who'd been abused, and unlikely to find other owners who were going to be patient enough for them," Franzen says. "Whether through a sense of identification or sympathy, he had a very hard time disciplining them. But you couldn't see his attentiveness to the dogs without getting a lump in your throat."

Because Wallace was secure, he began to talk about going off Nardil, the antidepressant he had taken for nearly two decades. The drug had a long list of side effects, including the potential of very high blood pressure. "It had been a fixture of my morbid fear about Dave — that he would not last all that long, with the wear and tear on his heart," Franzen says. "I worried that I was going to lose him in his early 50s." Costello said that Wallace complained the drug made him feel "filtered." "He said, 'I don't want to be on this stuff for the rest of my life.' He wanted to be more a member of the human race."

In June of 2007, Wallace and Green were at an Indian restaurant with David's parents in Claremont. David suddenly felt very sick — intense stomach pains. They stayed with him for days. When he went to doctors, he was told that something he'd eaten might have interacted with the Nardil. They suggested he try going off the drug and seeing if another approach might work.

"So at that point," says his sister Amy, with an edge in her voice, it was determined, 'Oh, well, gosh, we've made so much pharmaceutical progress in the last two decades that I'm sure we can find something that can knock out that pesky depression without all these side effects.' They had no idea that it was the only thing that was keeping him alive."

Wallace would have to taper off the old drug and then taper on to a new one. "He knew it was going to be rough," says Franzen. "But he was feeling like he could finally afford a year to do the job. He figured that he was going to go on to something else, at least temporarily. He was a perfectionist, you know? He wanted to be perfect, and taking Nardil was not perfect."

That summer, David began to phase out the Nardil. His doctors began prescribing other medications, none of which seemed to help. "They could find nothing," his mother says softly. "Nothing." In September, David asked Amy to forgo her annual fall-break visit. He wasn't up to it. By October, his symptoms had become bad enough to send him to the hospital. His parents didn't know what to do. "I started worrying about that," Sally says, "but then it seemed OK." He began to drop weight. By that fall, he looked like a college kid again: longish hair, eyes intense, as if he had just stepped out of an Amherst classroom.

When Amy talked to him on the phone, "sometimes he was his old self," she says. "The worst question you could ask David in the last year was 'how are you?' And it's almost impossible to have a conversation with someone you don't see regularly without that question." Wallace was very honest with her. He'd answer, "I'm not all right. I'm trying to be, but I'm not all right."

Despite his struggle, Wallace managed to keep teaching. He was dedicated to his students: He would write six pages of comments to a short story, joke with his class, fight them to try harder. During office hours, if there was a grammar question he couldn't answer, he'd phone his mother. "He would call me and say, 'Mom, I've got this student right here. Explain to me one more time why this is wrong.' You could hear the student sort of laughing in the background. 'Here's David Foster Wallace calling his mother.' "

In early May, at the end of the school year, he sat down with some graduating seniors from his fiction class at a nearby cafe. Wallace answered their jittery writer's-future questions. "He got choked up at the end," recalls Bennett Sims, one of his students. "He started to tell us how much he would miss us, and he began to cry. And because I had never seen Dave cry, I thought he was just joking. Then, awfully, he sniffled and said, 'Go ahead and laugh — here I am crying — but I really am going to miss all of you.' "

His parents were scheduled to visit the next month. In June, when Sally spoke with her son, he said, "I can't wait, it'll be wonderful, we'll have big fun." The next day, he called and said, "Mom, I have two favors to ask you. Would you please not come?" She said OK. Then Wallace asked, "Would your feelings not be hurt?"

No medications had worked; the depression wouldn't lift. "After this year of absolute hell for David," Sally says, "they decided to go back to the Nardil." The doctors also administered 12 courses of electroconvulsive therapy, waiting for Wallace's medication to become effective. "Twelve," Sally repeats. "Such brutal treatments," Jim says. "It was clear then things were bad."
Wallace had always been terrified of shock therapy. "It scares the shit out of me," he told me in 1996. "My brain's what I've got. But I could see that at a certain point, you might beg for it."

In late June, Franzen, who was in Berlin, grew worried. "I actually woke up one night," he says. "Our communications had a rhythm, and I thought, 'It's been too long since I heard from Dave.' " When Franzen called, Karen said to come immediately: David had tried to kill himself.

Franzen spent a week with Wallace in July. David had dropped 70 pounds in a year. "He was thinner than I'd ever seen him. There was a look in his eyes: terrified, terribly sad, and far away. Still, he was fun to be with, even at 10 percent strength." Franzen would sit with Wallace in the living room and play with the dogs, or step outside with David while he smoked a cigarette. "We argued about stuff. He was doing his usual line about, 'A dog's mouth is practically a disinfectant, it's so clean. Not like human saliva, dog saliva is marvelously germ-resistant.'" Before he left, Wallace thanked him for coming. "I felt grateful that he allowed me to be there," Franzen says.

Six weeks later, Wallace asked his parents to come to California. The Nardil wasn't working. It can happen with an antidepressant; a patient goes off, returns, and the medication has lost its efficacy. Wallace couldn't sleep. He was afraid to leave the house. He asked, "What if I meet one of my students?" "He didn't want anyone to see him the way he was," his father says. "It was just awful to see. If a student saw him, they would have put their arms around him and hugged him, I'm sure."

His parents stayed for 10 days. "He was just desperate," his mother says. "He was afraid it wasn't ever going to work. He was suffering. We just kept holding him, saying if he could just hang on, it would straighten. He was very brave for a very long time."

Wallace and his parents would get up at six in the morning and walk the dogs. They watched DVDs of The Wire, talked. Sally cooked David's favorite dishes, heavy comfort foods — pot pies, casseroles, strawberries in cream. "We kept telling him we were so glad he was alive," his mother recalls. "But my feeling is that, even then, he was leaving the planet. He just couldn't take it."

One afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother sat on the floor beside him. "I just rubbed his arm. He said he was glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor."

At the end of August, Franzen called. All summer long he had been telling David that as bad as things were, they were going to be better, and then he'd be better than he'd ever been. David would say, "Keep talking like that — it's helping." But this time it wasn't helping. "He was far away," Franzen says. A few weeks later, Karen left David alone with the dogs for a few hours. When she came home that night, he had hanged himself.

"I can't get the image out of my head," his sister says. "David and his dogs, and it's dark. I'm sure he kissed them on the mouth, and told them he was sorry."

[From Issue 1064 — October 30, 2008]

最近又翻到了这个电影的条目，忍不住又看了一遍，这已经是我第四遍看这部电影了。对我这种不喜欢反复观看一部电影的人来说，已经是挺夸张的次数了。

因此想随便记录一下自己对这部电影十分执迷的原因，事先说明，这些原因大概率跟电影艺术本身没什么关系：

1.DFW对我有极大的吸引力，对他最着迷的时候，我在纽约客上搜集了很多篇其他作家纪念他的文章，大部分都打印出来并看完了。虽然现在已经忘记了大半，但我对DFW的熟悉感和亲密感是一直存在的。他对我来说不是那种将会被纳入文学史并因此让我兴奋的“经典”作家，而单纯是那种和我的思维方式非常契合的作家，在心理感受上更像朋友（——是的，这有点诡异）。观看这部电影的体验，就像是拿着一块吸铁石轻轻划过一片细碎的铁屑，我所理解的DFW的各个心理侧面和他所关注的问题，都被立体地呈现出来了。

2.视点的转变。我对DFW的理解其实大多依赖于他的小说和非虚构作品，这部电影所提供的观察视点是最恰当也是最美妙的，完全赢过了乔纳森·弗兰岑纪念DFW的那篇文章。当然，要意识到所有叙事都是一种representation，这部电影也不例外，可是导演和编剧所把握的诸多要素其实跟我对DFW的理解非常契合，所以我理直气壮地照单全收。另外，电影里所拍摄的这段访谈文稿已经出版了，但是读起来平淡无奇。

3.第一次看这部电影其实是为了卷老师。卷西思维敏捷咄咄逼人但被人怼回的时候又露出狗狗眼的样子，对不起，我真的好爱。其实我看得出他演技里套路的成分，但那些又刻薄又焦虑又自我意识过剩的小动作我也很爱。自从看到了卷老师以后，我才发现，我是真的很喜欢nerd型的人。

4.对话和孤独。我喜欢对话，对话就像是小说中表示凸显的引号，既是表露也是防御。人与人之间的对话包含着试图互相理解的努力，可是很多时候我们的自我防御意识又证明了这种理解的徒劳，就像电影里DFW多次反问Lipsky：我说的话你一个字都不信对吗？

事实是，我们总是以自己的方式误解对方，而自我解释往往是徒劳，就像Lipsky的反唇相讥：你证明自己不惺惺作态的方式就非常惺惺作态。

自以为聪明的人总是以为自己对他人持有更加深刻的洞见，他们喜欢玩这种游戏来凌驾于对方的自我意识之上。我比较悲观：人最终将囿于自我意识，而相互理解只是一种短暂的妥协。

5.寒冷、音乐、飞机、书籍、写作和公路。

6.DFW会去人群中跳舞。不知道为什么，这让我感到悲伤。

7.DFW曾经当过towel boy和保安。有时我会想象那种生活。

8.电视机、电影、mall、美式快乐、空虚、自杀和死亡。

9.幸好这不是一部元电影，所以我能够沉浸其中。

10.这部电影成为了我的安抚物之一，我在自己和演员之间制造了一种亲密感，并对某一类意象上瘾。我正是DFW所说的那种长时间坐在屏幕前获得心灵抚慰的人。我喜欢他对reality的追求，我迫切地追求过同样的东西，却最终发现自己和虚幻融为一体。

11.我为了证明自己所执迷的东西有点意义还写了一篇影评。

像这样子的话痨电影，刚刚打开的时候还是有些抗拒。可是当深夜来临，独自躺在床上，再打开时，三分钟过后，便舍不得漏掉一个字。

看完之后，总觉得心里有些五味杂陈。旅途的终点，到底是什么呢？

刚刚出版了一部上千页文字的作家戴维，红极一时。见面时，不过是一个不修边幅看起来蠢蠢的大个子，和两条狗住在一个极为偏僻的小地方。他看起来只是一个极普通的人。

他所面对的也只是普通人所面对的问题。孤独。恶魔一般紧紧追逐的孤独。死亡是唯一可以摆脱的机会，同时也是真正臣服于孤独的时刻。那一刻，这个恶魔用天底下最鄙夷的神色注视着你，看着你缓缓走向死亡，你失败了，永远臣服在它的脚下。

卡夫卡曾说，我一生都在抗拒自杀的欲望中度过，忍耐疾病般忍耐着生存。活着的意义有很多，但那种渗透全身的孤独却令人对生存忘而却步。

作家戴维极喜欢看电视，无聊的节目与烂俗的大片都可以让他聚精会神，看得津津有味。但他家里却没有电视机，因为他怕自己深陷其中，就这样白白浪费了时光。

这是一个很悲哀的问题。正如我们大多数人都深陷网络的漩涡，一边讨厌着手机榨取了自己大好的年华，一边却在没有手机握在手心里时无所适从，焦虑不安。

戴维曾经酗酒，甚至有传言吸毒。他矢口否认自己是一个瘾君子。他不过是看到了自己生活的终点，生命在某一瞬间停滞了，不知该如何走下去。唯一的解决方法是换一种活法，让自己太过清醒的灵魂睡过去，以此来渡过生命的瓶颈。

而这扼住呼吸的瓶颈正是令人绝望的孤独。孤独是一种什么样的滋味？欲言又止，渴望陪伴却宁愿选择独处，是退缩，明知向前不论多远，终归回到起点，是看透生命的苍凉，一切都失去了意义。

生是欲望。一旦一个人开始渴望爱，渴望名，渴望利，渴望一切与欲望沾边的东西，生的欲望便被点燃。

然而，戴维却一直拼着全力摆脱这些东西，他不愿成为瘾君子，不愿用电视机浪费时光，也不愿获得世人过度的关注。可是他却渴望得到认可。

戴维最终选择自杀。是他杀了自己，也是很多人杀了他。他是一个禁欲者，斩断了自己对生的所有欲望。而他唯一的渴望，被认可。这更是虚无缥缈的东西。认可，有时候是理解，是赞赏。更多的时候，却是曲解，肆意的歪曲。

人是孤独的，自私的，自大的。所以彼此很难做到真正的理解，总是不经意带入自己，偏执地信任自己，而猜忌别人。渴望被理解，却总是被曲解，这应该是最深的孤独。

真实事件改编

看这个电影之前期待着各种大的场景，偏偏小众的片子，不服务大众，导演同样选择了取悦自己。读你的书何尝不是一种与你相识的方式呢，观众亦然。写影评的如果愿意把80%对白原封不动搬出来，不做解释让他人感受，便是一篇不错的东西。

愿我们可以明白自己，不为难自己。

大卫：

记者与作家的双重身份

我那时不懂商业区，母亲把我们从美满的生活里一把拉了出来钉在这条阴森的混迹着她那些艺术届朋友的死巷子里，我感到格格不入。

一名刚加入滚石的敏锐新人记者，有着高情商且刚出版了《小说集市》，有着朝气。出于对《无尽的欢笑》敬仰及自己应该做这样的事去采访大卫。

30岁刚毕业

大卫：

作家

他们是有意识的不给我任何刻意的指导方向，尽管显然，你最终变成的只能是你。

记者作家这样评价他：鲜活的自我。

书评：浓稠、尖刻、且长达干

34岁:21岁开始写作且小有名气，25岁毕业，做过几个月的保安，并且享受那种简单不用想的状态。健身房服务员，遇旧人不等同价值的观念让他一度崩溃，28岁自杀观察，缺乏生活，居住在小镇。

他们都是大卫。

我有不少朋友经历过戒酒，他们总说别在他们面前喝酒，他们会不舒服，我是说出于尊重我跟你点一样的就行。

不管是戒酒戒毒戒什么，我都没啥发言权，以一个旁观者的角度我有限的认知是，那些老资格的人不在乎，你就是在他们面前吸白粉也没关系。

相互的尊重理解。

记者可能是出于30年生活成长锻炼出的高情商，作家觉得这默契，是他一直希望的，因此有所好感，著作之人与敬仰之人的彼此认可。

大卫对于自慰和婚姻的角度让内心心生震动。

大卫说他接受采访是为了给自己赚点钱还有名气。这是真实的。

他曾在28岁，自杀观察：害怕连自杀都做不好。渴望文学上的成功，将自己沉迷于写作中导致抑郁。写作者的自省力让自己缓和。

他选择远离城市，是因为：每次去纽约，都会被卷入那种。就像是自负与自谪，随各自的境遇而交错起伏，如风箱般发出巨大的嘶嘶声。

没有人能感我所感，非写作圈的朋友只会惊叹我的照片上了时代杂志。

我只知道这是1992-1995年间，我所能做的最好水平了。如果大家纷纷恶评，我不会兴奋激动也不会太气馁。如果你已经习惯写那些厚重的不怎么卖的动的纯文学，身为有自尊的人类动物，你就会自圆其说以适应现实。如果这书很畅销，很受瞩目，那一定写的很狗屎。最最讽刺的是如果你的作品开始畅销了，开始受瞩目，之前受冷漠时你用以保护自己的机制就不再有用了，你完全没有赢面。

他并非沉迷毒品，只因会受众，所以虚构。他沉迷于电视，因缺乏社交，不被认可。电视如壁炉存在式的影响。而他又不能被影响，他选择逃跑，却又挣不脱。

那不是因为体内微量元素不平衡什么的，也不是因为毒品或酒精，我觉得我活着太依据美式理想了，即那种如果我达成了X Y 和 Z，一切就都会好起来的理念。我书里写过一段是讲当一个人从燃烧的摩天大厦跃下时，不是说他们不在惧怕坠落了，只是另一种选择更糟糕。这就会令你思考什么样的情况是如此糟糕，以至于你的死亡都显的是种解脱。我不知道你有没有过类似的体验，但这比任何物理伤害都更糟糕，这大概就是以前所谓的心灵危机。

感觉你生命中每一句箴言都成了谬误，万事皆空，你亦无物，一切皆是虚幻。

你比旁人出色太多，因为你你已看穿这一切，均不过是幻梦。

你也比旁人糟糕太多，因你已经该死的无法正常生活。

那种感觉非常骇人。

我觉得人是不会变的，我确信那仍旧深埋我身体里，大概我只是非常努力地在想办法不被它牵着走。

大卫彼此嫉妒，同时又有着占有欲。嫉妒他的才华，内心所感，人格，真实的发生。嫉妒交际，三言俩语便能逗笑自己认识几十年的友人。

那种嫉妒又很像小孩的那种你怎么不跟我好了一般。很显然大孩子别样的嫉妒让大卫大卫关系降到了冰点。

电影如同生活，吵架是情绪的宣泄，让对方知道你真实所想，坦诚。1:10:24-1:21:47

大卫因自己的冒失感到后悔，内疚。

惺惺相惜

他有辆老思域，破旧但还能开，大卫却没有换掉它，因为它是我的朋友。

我有书给你

我不怎么确信你会想成为我

我们都如此年轻，他想要更甚于他已然拥有的而我想要恰就是他已然拥有的。

愿你我有趣知烟火。