Infinite Jest made me a contemporary of Wallace when I read it in the first paperback edition—97? 98?—in college and felt like I was taking part in something that was happening. Who is to say it's not still happening?

Somehow, summer emboldens; everyone sees the public as more public.

'flexibility, multiplicity, confusion wanting to reflect the turmoil of reality'

Often, with the non-artsy, I am the one who shrinks away from more comprehensive understanding: I do not want to risk a disappointment great enough to make me give up on any engagement at all.

'all existed somewhere on the same cultural plane'

As a kid, when I first learned how to tape-record songs off the radio, they released so many singles from Bad that I thought I could record the whole album. I didn't understand why the radio station wouldn't let me hear that much of any other records.

Tracer on MJ the dancer.

[Three notes on joy]

'Incurious'— a cardinal sin.

'She sang pop music.'

'Reading the essay now, I still sense in it the initial exhilaration in finding ways to mean everything I was saying, and to say a larger fraction of what I had philosophically to say, than I had ever experienced. The elation was an experience as of escaping from what I had inarticulately felt in my philosophical education, and remaining in much of philosophy's dispensation as I began my life of teaching philosophy, as prohibitions on, or suspicions of, everyday speech, quite in the absence of patient attention to the individual utterance.'