AWESOME BRAIN POWERS

The Anti-Inspiration of True Genius

I’m kind of glad I didn’t get around to reading much David Foster Wallace until recently.

I’ve just finished the entirety of Consider the Lobster (the essay collection, not just the article originally published in Gourmet), and if I hadn’t completed the process of applying to MFA programs prior to reading it, I’m not sure any of my applications would’ve made it in.

DFW writes in a voice eerily similar to the way my brain talks to itself (or at least the way in which I’d like to believe my brain talks to itself); reading DFW collections is, of course, a wonderfully pleasurable experience, but it’s not purely positive. Right there with all that pleasure—sometimes just under its surface, sometimes wholly overshadowing—is a slow, creeping dread. It’s a kind of implacable horror, really, as I discover that someone else has already experienced every thought I’ve ever had—and has written it out with more talent and humanity and humor and sadness than I could possibly hope to muster.

Take, for example, this passage from the closing of the above-mentioned Gourmet article, which is long (the passage) but reprinted here (in what I think isn’t a violation of copyright) anyway, because fuck it, it’s worth reading:

In any event, at the Festival, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings …and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? I’m not trying to give you a PETA- like screed here—at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.

Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why? Or what about this one: Is it not possible that future generations will regard our own present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Aztec sacrifices? My own immediate reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme—and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I have not succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

You see that? He essentially describes why I was a vegetarian for a dozen years perfectly and completely and utterly by accident, without ever sounding pretentious or condescending or smug. He sounds (as he often does) a little lost and slightly sad and ever curious—hopeful that someone might know better, or at least be interested in talking it out and exploring these ideas together.