It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES.
David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest
I don’t have many favorite authors, but David Foster Wallace was one of them. Something about the way he could be incredibly intellectual, deep, funny, nonsensical, and yet, down-to-earth (sometimes all at once) resonated with me since first reading The Broom of the System many years ago. I don’t have the heavy emotional attachment to his work that some do (in my world, that kind of obsession is usually reserved for musicians and filmmakers), but I’m still finding it hard to stop thinking about his suicide.
On the Metafilter thread where I first heard the news, someone compared it to the news of Elliott Smith’s suicide a few years back, and I think that’s an apt comparison. Especially since both Smith and Wallace occupied valued space on my CD and bookshelves at the time of their deaths, but I didn’t really appreciate what they accomplished in their work until afterward. I own a good portion of the books DFW wrote, but I’ve really only ever read three of them. Strangely enough, I had just started his short story collection Girl With Curious Hair a few days ago.
We just can’t have nice things, dammit.