The Genius of David Foster Wallace

I am not an envious person. When I come across someone doing something extraordinary--a football player throwing a perfectly-placed spiral 50 yards downfield, a comic book artist whose artwork moves something deep and reptilian within me--I may think to myself, "It would be cool to be able to do that." But I almost never feel this thought in the tiny little hematocyte-spewing depths of my bones; sure, it would be cool to be able to do those things, but it's not a powerful desire.
This is not the case with the work of David Foster Wallace. I truly wish I could write like DFW. He was, quite simply, an unparalleled genius. We throw that word around these days, and it's pretty well devalued at this point, but I mean it in the literal sense. He was a man with a profound intellect, as well as an ultimately fatal sense of the human condition (borne, if you ask me, out of the curse/gift that is depression). He made a habit of explaining the ebb and flow of life in an extraordinary way, in a way that seemed both profoundly revelatory and, once you'd read his take on it, exceedingly obvious. He was a master wordsmith.
I'm finishing up his book, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which is a collection of essays and arguments. I'm currently reading the titular essay, about a 7-day cruise he took at the behest of the magazine Harper's (this is a perfect example of what I meant in the last paragraph about being a genius; he got paid to go on a luxury cruise because just his take on the entire affair would be fascinating enough to justify the expense--he was that good). 
About 35 pages into the essay, I ran across a section that--to my mind--is one of the greatest things ever written. It's not flashy. It's not pretentious. It's not even particularly deep, in the "what does it all mean" sense. It's simply quintessential DFW; effortlessly witty, penetrating, and, somehow, gloriously innocent. I've copied it below so that you may experience DFW in all his glory.
I hope you enjoy it.

"Celebrity's fiendish brochure does not lie or exaggerate, however, in the luxury department. I now confront the journalistic problem of not being sure how many examples I need to list in order to communicate the atmosphere of sybaritic and nearly insanity-producing pampering on board the m.v. Nadir.

How about for just one example Saturday 11 March, right after sailing but before the North Sea weather hits, when I want to go out to Deck 10's port rail for some introductory vista-gazing and thus decide I need some zinc oxide for my peel-prone nose. My zinc oxide's still in my big duffel bag, which at that point is piled with all of Deck 10's other luggage in the little area between the 10-Fore elevator and the 10-Fore staircase while little men in cadet-blue Celebrity jumpsuits, porters—-entirely Lebanese, this squad seems to be—-are cross-checking the luggage tags with the Nadir's passenger list Lot #s and organizing the luggage and taking it all up the Port and Starboard halls to people's cabins.

And but so I come out and spot my duffel among the luggage, and I start to grab and haul it out of the towering pile of leather and nylon, with the idea that I can just whisk the bag back to Cabin 1009 myself and root through it and find my good old ZnO; and one of the porters sees me starting to grab the bag, and he dumps all four of the massive pieces of luggage he's staggering with and leaps to intercept me. At first I'm afraid he thinks I'm some kind of baggage thief and wants to see my claim check or something. But it turns out that what he wants is my duffel: he wants to carry it to 1009 for me. And I, who am about half again this poor little herniated guy's size (as is the duffel bag itself), protest politely, trying to be considerate, saying Don't Fret, Not a Big Deal, Just Need My Good Old ZnO. I indicate to the porter that I can see they have some sort of incredibly organized ordinal luggage-dispersal system under way here and that I don’t mean to disrupt it or make him carry a Lot #7 bag before a Lot #2 bag or anything, and no I’ll just get the big old heavy weatherstained sucker out of here myself and give the little guy that much less work to do.

And then now a very strange argument indeed ensues, me v. the Lebanese porter, because it turns out I am putting this guy, who barely speaks English, in a terrible kind of sedulous-service double-bind, a paradox of pampering: viz. the The-Passenger's-Always-Right-versus-Never-Let-A-Passenger-Carry-His-Own-Bag paradox. Clueless at the time about what this poor little Lebanese man is going through, I wave off both his high-pitched protests and his agonized expression as mere servile courtesy, and I extract the duffel and lug it up the hall to 1009 and slather the old beak with ZnO and go outside to watch Florida recede cinematically a la F. Conroy.

     Only later did I understand what I'd done. Only later did I learn that that little Lebanese Deck 10 porter had his head just about chewed off by the (also Lebanese) Deck 10 Head Porter, who’d had his own head chewed off by the Austrian Chief Steward, who received confirmed reports that a Deck 10 passenger had been seen carrying his own bag up the Port hallway of Deck 10 and now demanded rolling Lebanese heads for this clear indication of porterly dereliction, and had reported (the Austrian Chief Steward did) the incident (as is apparently SOP) to an officer in the Guest Relations Dept., a Greek officer with Revo shades and a walkie-talkie and officerial epaulets so complex I never did figure out what his rank was; and this high-ranking Greek guy actually came around to 1009 after Saturday's supper to apologize on behalf of practically the entire Chandris shipping line and to assure me that ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various corridors in piacular recompense for my having had to carry my own bag. And even though this Greek officer's English was in lots of ways better than mine, it took me no less than ten minutes to express my own horror and to claim responsibility and to detail the double bind I'd put the porter in—-brandishing at relevant moments the actual tube of ZnO that had caused the whole snafu—-ten or more minutes before I could get enough of a promise from the Greek officer that various chewed-off heads would be reattached and employee records unbesmirched to feel comfortable enough to allow the officer to leave; and the whole incident was incredibly frazzling and angst-fraught and filled almost a whole Mead notebook and is here recounted in only its barest psychoskeletal outline."




--Gryffindork (all rights belonging to Harper's, DFW's estate, whatevs)