Battenkill Books called this afternoon to tell me the new biography of the writer David Foster Wallace – “Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace,” by D.T. Max had arrived, and I rushed down to get it. I have been waiting for this book, I knew it would be as beautiful a book as it is painful, and I was not wrong. I’ve been reading it for hours, and it breaks my heart.
Wallace, a brilliant writer – “Infinite Jest”, “The Broom Of the System,” “Interviews With Hideous Men,” – was an important writer for me, perhaps the most important of his generation, and he hung himself at the age of 46 after a life-long struggle with depression and anxiety and the powerful medications he had been taking. Wallace was an amazing writer but perhaps more than that, he showed, as Max writes, that “whatever the price, the meaningful life is always worth the fight.”
More than once when I fell apart I thought of hanging myself in one of the barns. I even know the spot, in the silo barn that I had chosen. I never came close to doing it, I don’t think, but I thought about it a lot. Whenever I thought about it, I thought about Maria, coming through the door in just a few days to help care for the animals. There were times for Wallace, as for so many others, when the pain of living was just not bearable, the fear and depression smothering life.
Despite his suicide, Wallace was a brave figure who did not surrender. He fought every day to live a meaningful life and was an inspiration to me and to others. His characters often testified to the fact that anyone who seeks a meaningful life will pay the price and reap the rewards. And there is a price, always, evidenced by the sad fact that so few people want to pay it or can. How often people tell me I have a perfect life, one they envy, here on a beautiful farm with my animals. I love my life dearly but I do not have the heart to tell them what it costs to seek a meaningful life, and perhaps they know, or they wouldn’t covet a life other than their own.
For all of that, I never doubt any more than Wallace did that a meaningful life is worth any price. It is always worth the risk. It is always worth the fight. It often means abandoning what is known, what is safe and secure, what is familiar and comprehensible to others, even our own families. It is worth every second and any price, and I write this post in honor of David Foster Wallace, a writer of accomplishment and suffering, whose price was high for a meaningful life.
He died for it.