All That

One of the last things I read in the naughties was “All That” by the late David Foster Wallace. I am not a David Foster Wallace nut, or anything even close, but I do love his writing a lot, and this essay, published in the New Yorker in early/mid December helped remind me of why. The last thing I had read by him was Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. It’s a math book. And it becomes too dense for me half way through. And it’s incredible. Oscillating from complex equations, peculiar philosophies and real world applications it shows Foster Wallace at his most idiosyncratic and helps solidify him as a spokesman for an era, if not a generation, that is equally comfortable with the banal, the ironic and the transcendent.

The beauty of “All That” is it has similar investigations into justifying concrete ideas with spiritual and abstract ones while still being a damn good read (and, surprisingly, a holiday themed one at that). It traces his spiritual beliefs back to a gift he received as a child (a toy cement mixer that his mother convinced him was magic) that led to a belief (or furthered a belief) that “magic not only permeated the everyday world but did so in a way that was thoroughly benign and altruistic.” He describes his feeling towards magic as “reverence,” which he defines as the “natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena.” This is distinct from the feelings of “respect” and “obedience” which he claims should “describe the attitude one takes toward observable and physical phenomena, such a gravity or money.” One is unanswered and leaves us ungrounded, while the others literally (in the case of gravity) or metaphorically (in the case of money) ground us. But each is significant and should be equally considered.

Oh, there is also some totally incredible descriptions of feelings of ecstasy and how voices in our heads are kind of real. Or something. Anyway, here's a link to the whole essay: All That.