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I’ve been trying to express very briefly why his work is good and important, at least w/r/t myself and, if I am lucky, by extension its significance to others. And all I could come up with was this: so much of his work was terribly honest about the complexity of everything and the need to gloss that complexity to function as a human being. I guess I should say: the only way to gloss the complexity of everything honestly is to admire the enormity of what we have to underestimate in order to exist. That his famously difficult work often distills into something as seemingly philosophically simple as his Kenyon commencement speech cited above, a somewhat more sophisticated evolution of the Golden Rule, is, I submit, the point. (For further reading, I recommend 8 November YDAU, pages 343-374 in Infinite Jest, his tour de force about the philosophy of AA.2)

At least that’s I think the direction of his fiction. We are fortunate that, before this tragedy, he left us with “Good People,” a quiet masterpiece that still seems lost in the glare of his more electric works but which I hope will rise in our estimation. Glossing it: it’s about those transformative moments when the things we continue to tell ourselves are real actually become real. I hope you read it.

  1. “Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of the two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s the terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” (IJ p. 696-697)