Instructor Pam Jensen had a 22-gauge revolver in her purse—she had promised herself a bullet to the roof of her mouth after her fifteen hundredth instructional presentation, which, at the current rate, would be July 1986.
…
In the middle of the summer I caught a movie on TV one night. In the last two years, I don't watch movies as much as I used to, I've devoted myself almost entirely to reading, but something attracted me as I was looking at her out of the corner of my eye while doing work on the laptop and I looked to find out who she is.
It was the The end of the tour a film based on a 1996 interview conducted by journalist David Lipsky for Rolling Stone magazine with author David Foster Wallace who had just published his widely regarded magnum opus, Infinite Jest.
Lipsky followed Wallace on the final leg of the book's promotional tour in Minneapolis. The article was never written after all. Twelve years later, after Wallace's suicide, Lipsky retrieved the tapes of that interview and wrote a book, The Although of course you end up becoming yourself, on which the film that was released in theaters in 2015 was based.
At the beginning of September and while I was browsing through the books that every month Politia bookstore has with a 50% discount, I came across a book whose author's name reminded me of something. It was the Pale king, Wallace's last unfinished book, published three years after his death. In this book Wallace follows the lives of US Internal Revenue Service examiners in an audit center somewhere in the midwestern states. It might sound a bit strange. Trust me, it is.
The book is fragmented and chaotic. I haven't read any other Wallace books but I think the style of the book is probably characteristic of the author. Wallace talks to us by observing the lives of the servicemen, both during their service and before, he brings us snapshots of their daily lives, tells us about their anxieties, their innermost thoughts, their fears, creates a microcosm, which is perhaps not very different from any other working microcosm, whether in the private or public sector, whether in America or in Europe, certainly within the borders of Western capitalism of the 20ου century.
In the book, the theme of boredom comes up again and again. The extent to which the boredom we experience as a tangible condition in our working lives mainly affects our lives in all areas. How important it is for someone not necessarily to be busy all the time during their working hours, but to feel from the nature of their work that what they are doing has some meaning, some impact on someone else's reality. And of course there is also the matter of managing the dead spaces during work. Have we finally reached a limit where we really have to look as a society for ways to work less? With the perspective of first improving our spiritual and mental health.
Wallace suffered from chronic depression. This led him to commit suicide in 2008, at the age of 46. After its release Infinite Jest recognized as one of the best writers of his generation. In the film it is clear through his conversations with Lipsky that he didn't like this attention, this rock star, he didn't think of himself as someone important enough for people to care about him and his life. I'm not an expert on depression, quite the opposite, but one image I have is that it can often be accompanied by feelings of frustration and helplessness. They may be remnants of past psychic trauma, or they may be due to a heightened sense of empathy for impasses in our lives and lifestyles in general. Wallace says at one point in the film that he reached a dead end, when he had to be hospitalized for a while, an incident that is also mentioned in Pale king, although the protagonist is another character, (let's note here that the author himself appears in the book as an employee of the service, as part of this whole meaningless bureaucratic monster), so Wallace says that he reached this dead end because he lived with very american way. He believed he had to follow a schedule where he would do/achieve A, B, C in sequence and everything would take its turn. Ultimately that was what was choking him. This social pressure for programming, with advertising as its battering ram and television as its Trojan horse, is perhaps the most successful machine for producing indolent people who end up working to consume and forgetting in the meantime to live. Like Edward Norton's character in the Fight Club who had furnished his apartment like an IKEA catalog and when it burned to the ground he felt he had lost his identity.
In 1996, the same year that the Infinite Jest, Tool, a music group from Los Angeles released their second album, the Aenima. In the first song of the record, at Stinkfist there is the following verse, "boredom is not a burden anyone should bear". When I heard the record, in 2001 at the age of 19, this verse in particular seemed a bit pretentious to me. The rest of the piece talks about how we need more and more intense stimuli to feel alive, but this does not necessarily give meaning to our lives. Growing up, I realized that the verse has an enormous depth and that today, 26 years later, we may have crossed over to the other side. Boredom, whether real or artificial, is a condition that occupies an increasingly large part of our lives, and as he says elsewhere in Pale king Wallace, nobody talks about her. We're always looking to fill our time with activities, we're always looking to be with people, without necessarily having anything to say, while at the same time we're unconsciously and pointlessly scrolling through social media, sneaking peeks into other people's lives. We are increasingly afraid of being alone.
At some point in the film Wallace and Lipsky start a conversation where Wallace wonders why guys like them, white, educated, with good and interesting jobs, with money, feel so empty and unhappy. The conversation turns to television and through a comparison to masturbation, both of which are described as beautiful ways to have a good time but still remain introverted forms of entertainment, Wallace says that in a few years technology will become more and more better, and making a special mention of online virtual reality porn, it will be easier and more enjoyable for everyone to sit on their couch than to socialize with each other. If we think about our daily lives, especially in the last two years with the pandemic, we are probably at the point described by Wallace in 1996.
After finishing the book I watched the movie. I felt with both an identification in many respects with Wallace. I felt sorry for him, cared for him. I felt a connection. I don't know if his writing suits everyone, or at least some. But his anxieties are real, meaning that we live in this era where if you look around you see people literally lost. People who may have solved some, if not all, of their survival problems, but still feel a constant void, an incompleteness.
Many of the dreams and aspirations especially of our generation were abruptly extinguished. We hit several dead ends in a row. Canceling is now our second nature. Maybe we get too frustrated because we try too hard. I do not know. I have no answers. I don't think Wallace had either. I think that art should not have answers, but should ask questions. Problems.
What I think is that maybe we should find a little more time to do nothing.
To sit down and look at the ceiling.
And not the TV.