D.T. Max on David Wallace (DFW Memorial Part V)

D.T. Max of The New Yorker has a heart-breaking story about David Foster Wallace -- his career as an author and his last days. Wallace was working on a novel called The Pale King before he died. His publishers expect to issue the incomplete manuscript next year.
Max writes:

The novel continues Wallace’s preoccupation with mindfulness. It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, “The Pale King” suggests, ultimately sets them free. A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out the novel’s idea: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.” On another draft sheet, Wallace typed a possible epigraph for the book from “Borges and I,” a prose poem by Frank Bidart: “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”

First, I find this description so poignant, and it vibrates on the same frequency as the Alcoholic Anonymous credo that Wallace depicted in Infinite Jest: One day at a time. Second, his passing yet again stikes me as so utterly sad -- an artist unable to complete his work, dead by his own hand from depression. Finally, I find it personally endearing that Wallace had become obsessed with taxes. I have my own obsession with taxes that developed relatively recently. It is its own arcane language, like a priestly code. Perhaps aliens will one day assume the IRS tax code was our holy book.
Read the entire article. Max wrote a previous article on the awe-inspiring literary archive at the University of Texas at Austin, so he has a great deal of sensitivity for Wallace's place in American letters.