This is water

David Foster Wallace died on Friday, which is to say he committed suicide. Many people have written about this already, and, well, here's one more. It's with good reason that Wallace has inspired so many glowing obituaries: he was a consummate entertainer, an adroit stylist, seemingly fearless in terms of the scope and depth of the stories he was willing to tell, and as exhaustive a thinker as you're likely to find this side of ancient Greece.

On Monday I read an article of Wallace's that I hadn't come across before. It's about Roger Federer and the sublimity of his tennis. As wonderful a fiction writer as Wallace was, I think he may have been more talented at non-fiction, and this article, although not my favorite of his, is still certainly a good example of his prowess. In it he refers to "Federer moments." "These are times," he writes, "as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and the eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you're O.K." I wonder if Wallace understood that his own work is full of many such moments. He was such a talented writer and thinker, he must have known what he was capable of, so I wouldn't be surprised if he did understand he could produce those kinds of effects in readers. And so, I suppose, what I really wonder is if he believed it, the compliments and accolades, or if he thought it was all just people being nice.

But putting that to one side, for all the acclaim of Wallace's literature that has poured out of commentators over the past few days, there has been, it seems, just as much space dedicated to his compassion, deep understanding, and overall human decency. This is what Sam Anderson said in New York Magazine:

"You got the sense, from his work and from interviews, that he was a deeply sweet man looking hard for wisdom."

Wisdom. That's what I'd come to expect from David Foster Wallace in the short time I'd been reading his work. Which is why, despite the dark themes and bleak forecasts that appeared in his writing, his death was such a shock to me. A wise man doesn't tie his own noose - it's such a simple rule it could fit inside a fortune cookie. And David Foster Wallace was a wise man.

The news came as even more of a surprise to a friend of mine. All she knew of Wallace's work was this commencement address - something a lesser writer such as myself would have been proud to consider his magnum opus and which, if you haven't read it, you should go read instead of this - delivered at Kenyon College in 2005. There's real truth in that address, "capital T truth," to use Wallace's words, as there is real truth in almost all of his work, and within that Truth there is humility and humanity and honesty and hope and an image of a world in which it is rarely, if ever, easy to live, but which it is nonetheless worthwhile to experience and to attempt, with extreme futility at times, to understand. There is wisdom in that address. And then there is the fact of David Foster Wallace's suicide.

The question wasn't so much "why?" as it was "how?" "How could someone who wrote that speech kill himself?" my friend asked. I think I said, "I don't know." But of course there is an answer to that question: people are complicated, and you can't judge a writer-cum-person based on the breadth of his work let alone one fifteen minute commencement address, just as you can't judge a book by the stock of its paper or the elegance of its font. But that doesn't really answer the question because the question isn't really about David Foster Wallace the person (and honestly, can we actually, truly, deeply care about DFW the person, those of us who never actually, truly knew him?), it's about David Foster Wallace the character, the one that she and I and you and they have drawn in our minds, created out of his own words, who is sage and clownish and fragile and hyperliterate and strong and sad and professorial and who is always holding a tennis racket and on and on and on, and what it felt like, to me at least, was that that character (always toothfully smiling in my mind, incidentally) also killed himself and not just his wife, but we found him dangling from a rafter in the attic (and still smiling, and dangling, and smiling, but) dead, and how can he kill himself, because if he kills himself, then what the Hell are we supposed to do? And I don't know the answer to that question - I'm no David Foster Wallace. I don't even know where I'm going with this line of thought, really, except to say that the both of them were/are important - the person and the character of David Foster Wallace - and that both of them will be missed and mourned, but that, I think, they each deserve to be mourned in different ways and understood in different ways because one death was of a fellow member of the human race, but the other death, the death of the character, feels as if it was the death of a piece of our own bodies and minds.

To go back to that article about Roger Federer, it was, in standard Wallace form, full of the eye-popping, jaw-dropping verbal and rhetorical acrobatics for which Wallace is rightly celebrated. But for all of those Wallace moments, my favorite part of this piece is the final paragraph of the final footnote. It's the moment, I think, that the Wallace wisdom shines through, and it's the moment that he's at both his most fearless and his most hopeful. It's the joyful kernel of Truth that he dug out of the story. It's the piece that hits you in the heart. And it's one of the things about his work that I loved most.

I'm still sure that David Foster Wallace was wise, is wise. I'm sure that he will remain wise, as long as his words can be read. The voice of that dangling caricature, smiling and hanging from a rope in my mind, hasn't been silenced by the rope around his neck. He's still talking and twirling a tennis racket, and every now and again he laughs which, as strange a thing as that might be for a hanged man to do, is still of some comfort to me because it tells me that the David Foster Wallace part of me is still alive. So maybe wise men do tie their own nooses, they just make sure to tie them loose enough that their souls can still slip out. You will be missed, Mr. Wallace, but I don't think you will be forgotten.