David Foster Wallace Zitate

seite 6

„Die wirklich wichtige Freiheit erfordert Aufmerksamkeit, und Offenheit und Disziplin und Mühe und die Empathie, andere Menschen wirklich ernst zu nehmen und Opfer für sie zu bringen, wieder und wieder, auf unendlich verschiedene Weisen, völlig unsexy, Tag für Tag.“

„Die Wahrheit wird dich frei machen. Aber nicht, bis es mit dir fertig ist.“

„Jeder ist in seinem geheimen, unausgesprochenen Glauben identisch, so dass er sich von allen anderen unterscheidet.“

„Mario, was bekommst du, wenn du einen Schlaflosen, einen Agnostiker und einen Legastheniker kreuzt? "

"Ich gebe auf."

"Man bekommt jemanden, der die ganze Nacht wach bleibt und sich mental mit der Frage foltert, ob es einen Hund gibt oder nicht."“

„Alles Unerträgliche ist im Kopf, weil der Kopf nicht in der Gegenwart verweilt, sondern die Mauern hochklettert, Erkundigungen einzieht und mit unerträglichen Nachrichten zurückkommt, die man dann irgendwie glaubt.“

„Die wirklich wichtige Art der Freiheit beinhaltet Aufmerksamkeit und Bewusstsein, Disziplin und Anstrengung, und die Fähigkeit, sich wirklich um andere Menschen zu sorgen, für Sie Opfer zu bringen, jeden Tag auf neue auf unzählige, kleine, unsittliche Arten und Weisen.“

„Ich tue so Dinge wie in ein Taxi zu steigen und zu sagen: "Zur Bücherei, und geben Sie gas!"“

„Dass es perverserweise oft mehr Spaß macht, etwas zu wollen, als es zu haben.“

“[W]e prefer not to countenance the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so good at one particular thing.... We prefer not to consider the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews, or to imagine what impoverishments in one's mental life would allow people actually to think in the simplistic way great athletes seem to think. Note the way "up-close and personal profiles" of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of rounded human life—outside interests and activities, charities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one pursuit. An almost ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to life in a world that, like a child's world, is very serious and very small.”

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J. D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”

“Past the flannel plains and the blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a. m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscatine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.”

“That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

“And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”

“The American Academy of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves. With kitchen tools, usually sometimes wire cutters. In answer to the obvious question, surviving patients most often report that their sexual urges had become a source of intolerable conflict and anxiety. The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.”

“It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you’ve seen perform in hard-core porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise erectile size, angle, and vasculature are known to you. That strange I-think-we’ve-met-before sensation one feels upon seeing any celebrity in the flesh is here both intensified and twisted. It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline HEART BREAKER on her right buttock and a tiny hairless mole just left of her anus.”

“A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange - of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow's abstract cost.”

“So much about today’s adult industry seems like an undeft parody of Hollywood and the nation writ large. The top performers are comic-book caricatures of sexual allure. The prosthetic breasts and lifted buttocks and (no kidding) artificial cheekbones are nothing more than accentuations of a mentality that yields huge liposuction and collagen industries. The gynecologically explicit sexuality of Jenna, Jasmin, et al. seems more than anything like a Mad magazine spoof of the “smoldering” sexuality of Sharon Stone and Madonna and so many other mainstream iconettes. Not to mention the fact that the adult industry takes many of the psychological deformities that Hollywood is famous for—the vanity, the vulgarity, the rank commercialism—and not only makes them overt and grotesque but seems then to revel in that grotesquerie.”

“Tax Law is like the world's biggest chess game with all sorts of weird conundrums about ethics and civics and consent of the governed built in. For me, it's a bit like math. I have no talent for it but find it still erotically interesting.”

“How long has it been since you did Absolutely Nothing? I know exactly how long it's been for me. I know how long it's been since I had every need met choicelessly from someplace outside me, without my having to ask or even acknowledge that I needed. And that time I was floating, too, and the fluid was salty, and warm but not too-, and if I was conscious at all I'm sure I felt dreadless, and was having a really good time, and would have sent postcards to everyone wishing they were here.”

“Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Notkin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G. W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic conviction that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e. g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer or something, so that whenever he tumifies he'll suffer the same order of guilt that your less eccentrically tortured Ph. D.-type person will suffer at the idea of, say, wearing baby-seal fur. Molly still takes the high-speed rail down to visit him every couple of weeks, to be there for him in case by some selfish mischance he happens to harden, prompting black waves of self-disgust and an extreme neediness for understanding and nonjudgmental love.”

“You know what your problem is, Hallie?' 'I have just one problem?”

“Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?”

“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U. S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."”

“Not unlike urban gangs, police, carnival workers and certain other culturally marginalized guilds, the US porn industry is occluded and insular in a way that makes it seem like high school.”

“Betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle's always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave”

“Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men's tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer moments. These are times, watching the young Swiss at play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you're OK”

“A large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful—what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?—and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence to it…”

“So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde… puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.”

“Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.”

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i. e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

“There is something inescapably bovine about an American tourist in motion as part of a group. A certain greedy placidity about them. Us, rather. In port we automatically become Peregrinator americanusy Die Lumpenamerikaner.”

“A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i. e., passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a very difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a D. S.'s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity--you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and do it more or less continually.”

“An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

“After a few weeks of this she'd spend a whole day weeping, beating at herself as if on fire.”

“Then Thursday Coyle had his left wrist tied to his right ankle and was still beating this new kid Stockhausen until Schtitt sent Tex Watson down to tell him to knock it off.”

“In some respects all this variety is probably good, productive of difference and dialogue and so on. But it can also be confusing and stressful for the average citizen. Short of signing on to a particular mass ideology and patronizing only those partisan news sources that ratify what you want to believe, it is increasingly hard to determine which sources to pay attention to and how exactly to distinguish real information from spin.”

“More than any other mass medium, radio enjoys a captive audience—if only because so many of the listeners are driving—but in a major market there are dozens of AM stations to listen to, plus of course FM and satellite radio, and even a very seductive and successful station rarely gets more than a five or six percent audience share.”