"Perhaps one of the reasons I could never read Wallace is that what he’s describing is the inside of the head of the sorts of depressed and narcissistic people who raised me. That fictive universe feels like the one I chewed my own arm off to escape, and one reason I escaped into outdoor sports is because that was a world where it was easy to determine what was Real and what was unimportant. Keeping warm enough in bad weather not to die of hypothermia: Real. What you looked like while doing it: Not Real. Not panicking when you encounter a bear standing on his hind legs and woofing at you on a trail you’ve hiked with your dogs a million times: Real. Even in the garden where the stakes are lower, cause and effect is pretty clear: enough water and sunshine and you get tomatoes and lettuces. You don’t get interpretations of tomatoes and lettuces."
Charlotte McGuinn Freeman, in Franzen, Suicide and the Real, a reaction to Jonathan Franzen’s reaction to David Foster Wallace’s death. I love Wallace’s nonfiction and could never get much into his fiction, and perhaps this is why. (via)
(As an aside, I briefly was a philosophy major in college, and what bugged me most about everyone was the idea that nothing could be called capital-T true. Honestly, if you’re nervous that there is no such thing as impartial Truths and that we’re all just swimming in a sea of arbitrariness, try to grow a plant, say a yucca you found on clearance at Target and set up on milk crates in front of your window. You’ll find that there are things that are unequivocally good for it and things unequivocally bad. Plus, you’ll feel better about yourself.)
