Wallace and the Mundane

The Practical Polymath #99

Hi friends, 

Greetings from Brooklyn! 

November is here, the end of the year is near, it’s time to choose the books I’ll read next year. I started doing it a year ago as an experiment. The goal was to give myself the literary education I disdained in school. And oh boy what a ride it has been. It is a ritual I’ll be doing for years to come. 

I want to write more about this in a future newsletter. But in the meantime, if you feel so inclined, why not indulge in the pleasure of putting together your own reading program for 2025?  

Until next time, 

Florian 

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Wallace and the Mundane

"This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water'?"

Infinite Jest is a book about paying attention. More specifically, it is a book about paying attention to the stuff we think are not worthy of our attention. About the mundane and the ordinary bits of life that fly below the level of consciousness. 

The book itself is a 1,000-page attention-siphoning door-stopper. If you make it through, the only reading you’ll tolerate for a few days is the recipe on the back of your kids’ Kellogg’s corn flakes box. But you’ll have trained your palate to savor the mundane.    

Routine maketh meaning. 

I started enjoying the book when I got into a routine of reading twenty pages a day. Every night, I'd gather the little energy left in the body after putting two children to bed, sit myself down at the dining room table, and chew off another chunk of the book. 

Embracing an overzealous devotion to routine is a major theme in Infinite Jest. The Enfield Tennis Academy players wake up at dawn for their daily drills, hitting hundreds of identical shots in biting cold. “Just do it”, yells their coach. “Forget about is there a point, of course there’s no point. The point of repetition is there is no point.” Down the hill, at the Ennet Recovery House, former addicts yield to the excruciating routine of AA meetings, showing up day after day to keep the addiction at bay.  

No need to be a tennis player or a substance abuser to experience daily, tedious routine. All of us do. Pulling the blinds, making the bed, unloading the dishwasher, wiping the kitchen counter, taking the trash out. Far from being pointless, Wallace suggests it's in this very repetition that we find meaning. 

The silent but sacred rhythm of small tasks, repeated infinitely is the marrow of existence. 

Wisdom wears rags. 

I get frustrated when I can't seem to find what to write about. If only I had the right system to magically pull ideas from. Only when I sit myself down to write am I reminded that the only way to figure out what to write about is, well, to just write. 

It’s uncomfortable to realize the way to achieve almost anything is deceptively simple yet by no means easy. And the instinctive defense mechanism is to reject simple as overly simplistic. Plus, if it were that simple, the only thing left to blame would be my willpower. The horror! 

The same dynamic plays out in Infinite Jest. The newbies at the AA meetings roll their eyes at the sound of mantras like "One Day at a Time," or "Fake it Till you Make it." But gradually, they learn to accept that the "the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers." These worn-out phrases have earned their status precisely because they work. 

Instead of scoffing at simple truths and age-old sayings we should bow to them with humility. 

Empathy is freedom. 

We'll only ever experience the world through our own eyes. The perspective of others is irretrievably out of reach. This solipsistic worldview weighed heavily on Wallace's mind. The consequence, he thought, is the self-delusion that each of us is at the center of the universe and everyone else is just in the way. 

Brooklyn gives me a taste of it on an almost daily basis. There’s the subway rider eager to share his taste in music, the driver who slow-rolls his car such that you better not stop crossing, or the dog owner unperturbed by the stream of pee their dog adorned the sidewalk with.  I can immediately hear the little voice in my head deliver the harsh verdict: “Shame on you, you morally debased and bankrupt soul.”  

This is the kind of automatic thinking Wallace invites us to keep in check. Not out of saintly detachment. But as the necessary work to regain control over a mind on auto-pilot. 

Infinite Jest is written as an antidote. The characters seem to come from the furthest margins of human experience, each more impossible to relate to than the last - a wheelchair assassin desperate to avenge his dying wife, a weed-addicted tennis player who has lost the ability to speak, a guru who provides fitness advice if you'll let him lick the sweat off your arms. Yet Wallace succeeds in making each and every one of those characters somehow endearing. He does so in two distinct ways. The first is by using mundane quirks and preoccupations as a bridge. For example, when he says of a character that “he could never resist biting down once a mint’d melted to a certain size and texture”, I can almost immediately relate to that experience. Wallace elevates those banal experiences as a sort of universal inner language, a common ground that makes empathy possible. The second device he uses is making experiences entirely foreign feel almost physically familiar. He describes clinical depression as “the nausea of the cells and soul.” 

These aren’t just literary devices. Wallace wanted to demonstrate how we might suspend our instinctive judgment toward others and replace it by a genuine curiosity about how they might experience the world. That we ought to consciously choose to do that not because it is morally preferable but because the alternative is to abdicate to unconscious, automatic thinking. The reward isn't becoming a better person; it's escaping the prison of our own heads.

Whether it’s embracing the sacred character of daily routines, recognizing the wisdom hidden in plain sight or doing the work of radical empathy, Infinite Jest is a tribute to the mundane. In Wallace’s words: “we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over again: ‘this is water, this is water’” 

Lateral Thought 

“In my experience with students—talented students of writing—the most important thing for them to remember is that someone who is not them and cannot read their mind is going to have to read this. [...] The reader cannot read your mind. That would be the biggest one.” 

David Foster Wallace