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Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...David Foster Wallace
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That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.David Foster Wallace
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Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. ‘Love’ is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.David Foster Wallace
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Weight Watchers holds as a descriptive axiom the transparently true fact that for each of us the universe is deeply and sharply and completely divided into for example in my case, me, on one side, and everything else, on the other. This for each of us exhaustively defines the whole universe.. And then they hold by a prescriptive axiom the undoubtedly equally true and inarguable fact that we each ought to desire our own universe to be as full as possible, that the Great Horror consists in an empty, rattling personal universe, one where one finds oneself with Self, on one hand, and vastly empty lonely spaces before Others begin to enter the picture at all, on the other. A non-full universe.. The emptier one’s universe is, the worse it is.. Weight Watchers perceives the problem as one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other.. We each need a full universe. Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void caused by that diminution of Self. Certainly not incorrect, but just as certainly only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem.. Is my drift getting palpable? Just as in genetic engineering.. There is always more than one solution.. An autonomously full universe.. Rather than diminishing Self to entice Other to fill our universe, we may also of course obviously choose to fill the universe with Self.. Yes. I plan to grow to infinite size.. There will of course eventually cease to be room for anyone else in the universe at all. .David Foster Wallace
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JAY: Why is a story more upfront than life? L E N O R E: It just seems more honest, somehow. J A Y: Honest meaning closer to the truth? L E N O R E: I smell trap. J A Y: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more? L E N O R E: I would kill for a shower.David Foster Wallace