“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
The fourth Chapter of Infinite Jest was by far the saddest we have come across so far, especially the part about the grandfather.
However, there is something else that stood apart in the middle of all the puzzlingly intertwined stories, and that is the fictional equivalent of what we call today, Facetime.
How David Foster Wallace envisioned that happening decades in advance is absolutely mind blowing.
Conclusions can be easily drawn with other brill writers that had successfully predicted sociological and political trends decades before they had actually occurred.
Orwell and his Big Brother surveillance and post-truth era (Fake news).
Aldous Huxley and predictions about anti-depressants, conditioning of children in school… Only to go further and make a spectacular 180 degrees shift in Island (a sort of anti-Brave New World novel) where he describes a breakaway society with a decentralized economy.
Before them there was Yevgeny Zamyatin's and his epic 1920s novel “We”.
And now we have Infinite Jest while without being so dystopian as the aforementioned masterpieces, it offers a never-ending supply of sarcasm about a futuristic consumerism-addicted society which David Foster Wallace painted so brilliantly in this beautiful novel.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
For more details, here’s the recording to the entire session of the second steemit Book Club:
https://soundcloud.com/user-655948001/infinite-jest-session-4-of-the-steemit-book-club
Details for the next meeting:
Book: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Reading Assignment: Chapter Five “YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDER-GARMENT” (pages 169-219)
Date: Monday, April 17th
Start Time: 6:00 p.m. PST / 9 p.m. EST / 2 a.m. GMT
Call Length: One hour.
Phone Access: (800) 719-6100 or (218) 339-7800, access code 629-1831#
Web Audio Access (sound quality isn't generally as good as phone): https://hello.freeconference.com/conf/call/6291831
P.S. You can these links to help guide you as you read Infinite Jest:
http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/Infinite.htm (THIS LINK HAS SPOILERS)
http://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/index.php?title=Main_Page#Page_by_Page_Annotations (No spoilers---This is the link Ahmed mentioned on the first call.)
Best,
