teensy little pecker, is give a giggle. That's all.
She didn't KNOW no better.
Going to hang them, Little Bill?
LITTLE BILL stares at her and then slowly turns and exits.
ALICE and SKINNY follow him.
INT NIGHT SKINNY’S
The two cowboys are tied up
in the middle of the floor.
LITTLE BILL, ALICE, and
SKINNY enter from upstairs.
LITTLE BILL
Clyde, step over to the office
and get the bull whip.
ALICE
A whipping? That's all they
get after what they done?
LITTLE BILL
A whipping ain't no littlething, Alice
ALICE
For what THEY done they deserve MORE.
SKINNY
Alice, shut up! Little Bill,
a whippingain't going to SETTLE this.
(showing The Paper)
This here is a lawful contract between me
and Delilah Fitzgerald, the cut whore.
I brought her clear from Boston,
I paid her expenses and all, and
I've got a contract here that
representsan investment of Capital.
LITTLE BILL
(sympathetic toThe Argument)
PROPERTY.
SKINNY
Damaged property. Like if I was to
hamstring one of their cow ponies.
LITTLE BILL
So you figure nobody will
want to fuck her now, right?
SKINNY
Hell NO, least ways
they won't PAY to do it.
Maybe she can clean up the place
or something, but nobody's going to pay
good money for a cut upwhore.
LITTLE BILL You boys off the Bar T.
You got your own string ponies?
DAVEY Yeah, I got four.
(MIKE does not answer. LITTLE BILL kicks him)
MIKE Six.
LITTLE BILL I Guess you'd just as soon
not have a trial. No fuss, huh?
DAVEY Uh, no sir.
LITTLE BILL Alright, you did the cuttin’
so come this fall you bring in five ponies
and you give them over to Skinny here.
MIKE Five?
LITTLE BILL And you... you bring in two,
you give them over, you hear?
DAVEY Yes, sir.
CLYDE Here's your bull whip, Little Bill.
LITTLE BILL Maybe we won't need this whip now. Let me tell you come the spring, if Skinny doesn't have those ponies (he cracks the whip) I'm going to come looking for you.
ALICE You ain't even going to whip them?
LITTLE BILL Well, fined them instead, Alice.
ALICE For what THEY done?
Skinny get's some ponies, and that's it?
That ain't fair, Little Bill. That ain't fair!
(LITTLE BILL grabs her
and pulls her towards him.)
LITTLE BILL Haven't you seen
enough blood for one night, Huh?
Hell, Alice, it ain't like they were tramps,
or loafers or bad men, you know there were
just hard working boys who were foolish.
If they was given over to Wickedness
in a regular way then I could see...
ALICE Like whores?
SKINNY Alice! tend to Delilah.
LITTLE BILL Go ahead.
INT DAYDELILAH'S ROOM
(The women are sitting around a bed
where DELILAH lies unconscious.)
SILKY I got eighty five dollars.
KATE I don't know, if Delilah doesn't care
one way or the other what are we all getting
so riled up about?
ALICE Just because we let them smelly foolsride us like horses don't mean we gotta let them BRAND us like horses.
00:00Cia: It was two year ago that the national attention was brought to plight of Jennifer Harbury. An American citizen whose husband, a Guatemalan rebel commander had vanished. She received no help from the American or Guatemalan governments despite her suspicions that CIA operatives may have been behind his disappearance. Finally after a string of hunger strikes, a prime time profile 60 minutes, and the efforts of then representative, now senator Torricelli, she was given the news that she was dreading. Her husband had been killed. Rather than providing closure, however this news only increased her desire to call attention to the CIA involvement in the abuses of human rights, joining me now Jennifer Harbury, her new book "Searching for Everado", tells the story of her ordeal. Also with us senator Robert Torricelli, the man who has championed her cause in congress. I am pleased to have both of them. Welcome.01:05Both: Thank you Charlie.01:07Charlie Rose: Congratulations on the book, congratulations on the election. Uh, I want to get to the future rather than the past, but just briefly, I've told a little bit of it, when we say CIA operatives, we're talking about people in Guatemala on the payroll of the CIA who knew about what had happened to your husband, but were still receiving money from the CIA and the U.S. Government and people in the government who knew what had happened to your husband, or should of known what happened to your husband, and despite your efforts to find out, uh, didn't come foreword. But in a capsule, give me a sense, tell me the story. that we've told before. LAWYER01:41Jennifer Harbury: My husband was a Mayan leader of the resistance for assistant Guatemala. The army captured him alive in combat, faked his death, and tortured him for about a year. According to the CIA files, he was tortured repeatedly, he was drugged repeatedly by army physicians. He was placed in a full body cast to avoid his being able to escape, and was eventually executed without trial. All that time he was secretly detained with the army insisting that he had died in combat. In the files I've also found notices that um, the CIA reported to the White House and the State Department 6 days after his capture that he was a prisoner of war. When I found out he was still alive after witness escaped, um, in 1993, apparently somebody did speak to military officials and received a report that he was still alive. That was not passed on to any of us. I was told repeatedly that there was no information about him. I went through a series of hunger strikes when in fact there were reports that he was in fact dead. Not only that, that he was in the hands according to the02:49Iob Report: What is it, that you have not yet been able to, find and have returned to you, his remains.02:56Jennifer Harbury: Most of the reports indicate that he's buried under the Las Cabanas military base near the Mexican border, which is in the zone where he was held and seen being tortured. It's a small military base, a string of barbed wire, a few huts, and their villagers report that there are 500 to 2,000 Guatemalans buried under that base. We had a number special orders from the court to allow an exhumation This special prolocutor tried again and again to open that mass graveyard he was shot at, he was put under 24 hour day death threats together with his son until he was ran out of office. No one else has been able to get into that graveyard to open it.03:37Charlie Rose: What do you want now? I mean what is the thrust of the book which tells the history, but also what remaining questions are there what are your imperatives, what story do you want to tell?03:48Jennifer Harbury: I want to know everything about what happened to him, Who did it, who knew what, when did they know it, who participated in what. I want some kind of closure to the case in the sense of something happening that I can be certain that this will not continue to happen. When I did human rights work in Guatemala in '85 and '86, I lost an average of a friend a week to the death squads. People who were found mutilated and dead in cornfields and gutters, or never seen again. They're still dying even though the peace accords have been signed. A week later too, two Mayan leaders for civil rights groups were shot to death in their car. A former supreme court judge is now missing. Several court officials are under death threats et cetera et cetera. I want something so I know that this type of conduct by United States officials will not be repeated, and I want something so the Guatemalan army not feel that it can with full impunity continue to kill at will.04:44Charlie Rose: Has there been any change, because of all this taking place? In attitude towards your request?04:49Jennifer Harbury: Well yes. I mean there have been some changes I've received a good chunk of the files, pursuant to my lawsuit under the freedom of information act. I've gotten some files. Um, we have a civil rights case now pending in the federal disctrict court in Washington that I hope very much will bring about needed reforms. We're pressing through congress to have the files on human rights violations opened up so the Guatemalans can find out what happened to their family members. I can't tell you what it's like to think about someone you really care about is in a secret cell somewhere being horribly abused by some maniac. You can't sleep, you can't eat, you can't think about anything else except about trying to bring an end to that suffering, while you're by your family member. 200,000 people are disappeared or dead in Guatemala by the death squads, those families are still in pain, and I think they have the right to some answers. They also have a right to go to the courts and get these killers put off the streets.05:48Charlie Rose: What do you think the United States government should be doing, that it's not doing? SENATOR (D-NJ)05:54Robert Torricelli: I think Charlie that a lot of this is symptomatic of the fact that for so many years, through the fight against fascism, and in the cold war, our country had to make, so many, understandably, had to make so many moral compromises and the kind of people we had to deal with, to survive, that we don't have to turn it off. We don't have to hire Guatemalan colonels anymore to work for the CIA. We don't have to deal with people who traffic in narcotics to get information about global communism. It's over. Turn it off.06:27Charlie Rose: But are you saying they haven't turned it off?06:29Robert Torricelli: They haven't turned it off.06:32Charlie Rose: Even today?06:34Robert Torricelli: Well the fact that as late as in Jennifer's experience we were paying officers in the Guatemalan military, who we knew were involved in the murder of not just Guatemala citizens, but of American citizens. And involved in human rights abuses, and even in narcotic trafficking to our own children and our own people. That this was going on as late into the1990s I think is the case that the intelligence community --06:55Charlie Rose: But since then,06:57Robert Torricelli: Adjusting slowly at least.07:00Charlie Rose: But since then we've had all the attention that you have generated because of the powerful and eloquent voice you have brought to this, uh, on lots of national media, this one included, it would seem to me that we now know about the kind of people that were on the CIA payroll.07:14Robert Torricelli: And John Deutch before he left, was head of the agency, he has now claimed there is going to be human rights standards, that we've learned the lesson that sometimes, the information that usually, ironically, comes from these sources isn't reliable anyway because of the kind of people that they are, and even if it is reliable, the association of these pe, gives more political damage then any security benefit we get. As a virtue of that, it is claimed that there a re 1,000 of these assests around the world, cause of narcotics or human rights abuses that we will no longer employ. I think that's good news.07:48Charlie Rose: Do you think that'll be carried out?07:52Robert Torricelli: Well I was very hopeful that with Toney Lake I think given who he is, he would of been the kind of >>CIA director that really would of enforced it. Now with Mr. Tenet: Why do you not know about Mr. Tenet, because he's too much what? Or too little what? The record is of being part of the agency. Getting control of it is not good, by most who have tried. And second whether or not he has too much of the intelligence community. But I think that remains to be seen. Eh, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.08:21Charlie Rose: Ok. And we'll give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean he was chairman of the staff committee on intelligence in the senate. Uh, went over there and been deputy for what, 18 months or a year. Uh was going to continue to be deputy if Tony Lake had been confirmed, now president seemed to have appointed him as an easy way out and with recognition of his abilities, we're not taking anything away from him. Are you saying that to get things straight at the CIA, it's unlikely to happen because what's necessary and essential is someone from outside who will really change things?08:51Robert Torricelli: Uh first I think it starts with the administration. the law requires that the CIA share information, as in these cases. If an American is abused, the laws are violated, the president should be told. The congress is to be told. that's never going to be taken seriously until the president and the congress insist upon it. The agency still acts when they give us information about intelligence operations as if they're doing us a favor. It's not a favor, it's the law. That has to start with the president. And then I think ironically it may be the one agency of government where the man or woman who leads it, needs not to be of it. Not to have experience with it. From the outside.09:36Charlie Rose: Then you just said the president has the kind of09:40Cia He Wants: At the moment I have seen it promised a different CIA I have not seen the level of demand that convinces me it's going to happen.09:45Charlie Rose: I want to come back to Jennifer in a second, but let me just to stay with the CIA for a second, what about all the revaluations about moles here and moles there, and all of the uncovering you think that there is a new mindset there about those kinds of things?09:56Robert Torricelli: You know Charlie, I served in the intelligence community in those years, in the cases of the moles and in fact the operatives we now know are working for the Soviets during the cold war and the years after.10:10Charlie Rose: And he ain't going to arrest them. Ironically, the greatest responsibility of that falls upon this same mindset of the CIA. Those moles should have been found out long before. And the reason they weren't, they weren't allowed access by the FBI. Cause the FBI is in fact in charge of counter intelligence.10:28Robert Torricelli: They wouldn't cooperate with the agency of the United States government that could of found these moles, because of this same attitude of the agency being separate, and being apart. And the United States paid a high price for that with Aldrich Ames and other cases.10:39Charlie Rose: Let me come back now, I want to talk about two different strains here. But the meet10:44Jennifer Harbury: They meet10:47Charlie Rose: In your case. they meet here. What happened to the man who was a CIA operative? Guatemalan, on the payroll, who knew of your husbands murder?10:55Jennifer Harbury: Well, he more than knew, that was colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, a school of the Americas graduate, who was seen by an eye witness as he bent over my husbands body, my husband was bound hand and feet to a table, there was an unidentified gas tank next to the bed, he was swollen enormously. The word the man used was deformed. His arms and legs were heavily bandaged as if they had ruptured, or hemorrhaged. And he was raving. Colonel Alpirez more than knew what was happening to my husband. He was one of the people in charge, for a long period of time, of the secret detention and of his torture an interrogation, and there's one document that indicates that he actually gave a confession about requesting permission to have him executed, to the attorney general of Guatemala.11:39Charlie Rose: What happened to him?11:41Jennifer Harbury: He um, is supposedly not on military payroll anymore, and is supposedly not on CIA payroll anymore. I assume he is not on CIA payroll, de facto. Um, he is still active among military circles, he was teaching at a military school for a while, and I hear intermittently that he is still in fact closely involved with the army. I think, as a number of the files indicate, he knows way too much about both the army and the CIA to really cross.12:08Charlie Rose: What do you think, if anything, can bring closure for you? I mean just to know that this man that you loved so much, was in that prison, in that cell, enduring that kind of torture.12:20Jennifer Harbury: Well, nothing can bring a person back, and nothing can erase that. There is nothing we can do, at that level. I would like to see the case go through the inter-American court it's actually been accepted as a full international trial in Costa Rica by OAS, that's highly rare, it's a very special situation. At that point the army for the first time ever will face an international panel of judges that it cannot assassinate and cannot terrorize. There will be some kind of, I believe, I'm confident. some kind of final ruling that yes the army did kill him, that they cannot say that he ran off with another woman, they can't say that's really him buried in the first grave, that I just got confused because all Indians look a like. They won't be able to say any of those things, There will be an international recognition and condemnation of what had happened. And that's a major step in breaking the army's impunity. For once, at the highest levels, they will be accused and sentenced so to speak. Not criminally sentenced, they can be fined, but just found guilty of torture, of a hoax, of lying, of obstruction of justice, of murder. That will be very very important, and it will make me breath a little easier that the Mayans in Guatemala will be safer in the future, As for the U.S. I would like to see those files opened, all CIA files, all agency files on major human rights cases in Guatemala and in other countries in the hemisphere. I want everyone else in this hemisphere to be able to sleep at night too.13:46Charlie Rose: I assume they're going to reject that immediately by saying you know, we cant compromise certain people, I mean by opening all human rights files we're going to compromise somebody and we can't do that and that's part of the problem.13:59Jennifer Harbury: They don't need to name the names of innocent bystanders, do we want as a matter of national security to obstruct justice and hide the identities of those who commit murder, torture and secret detention? Is that part of our national security? But even if those names are withheld, at least the families need to know, where was my son of my wife taken, what happened to them? Where are they buried? Are they alive or dead? Et cetera et cetera. At least the basic underlying facts, in fact in the criminal court system we do exactly that every single day with drug informants. The basic underlying fact minus identifying details of informants are given routinely. There's no reason why that can't happen on the same level with these files. No reason whatsoever.14:45Charlie Rose: I remember, and you talked to me at the time, you-, at some, and you'll help me to understand this, at some political risk, because, help me unremember exactly what you, what you, when you made available information you had because you were a member of the intelligence committee. You got in trouble in the house, and there were screams for your head.15:07Robert Torricelli: Well uh, I had actually seen on 60 minutes the case of Jennifer being on her hunger strike in Guatemala15:14Charlie Rose: And that's what drove you to act? Seeing her on 60 minutes?15:19Robert Torricelli: Well I saw this and I, at the conference of the Americas in Miami the year that followed, I had to occasion to see the foreign minister of Guatemala, and I asked her about the program, and what she knew about Jennifer Harbury and the disappearance. And she told me a story that was clearly so convoluted, that it peaked my interest. And I went back to Washington and I met with the assistant secretary Mr. Watson, of the Latin American state department, and his story was equally convoluted. It is by that I started to ask questions, and uh then a very brave man, who has since lost his career as consequence of this case, came to me and said you need to know you're not being told the truth. Jennifer was sitting outsid-16:00Charlie Rose: He is now your employee, is he not?16:03Robert Torricelli: I hired him. Jennifer was sitting outside the White House on a hunger strike and he told me, not only do they know what happened to her husband, they know when and who's responsible. I told her, I wrote a letter to the president-16:18Charlie Rose: And they were included whom?16:21Robert Torricelli: Well the agency-16:23Charlie Rose: But do you know people who said, we don't know? Who actually lied to you because you knew they, that individual knew?16:30Robert Torricelli: I don't believe Bill Clinton knew, I believe Bill Clinton was in the same situation the congress was in, that we were not told. But clearly, in the National Security Agency and in the State Department, at significant levels, people knew that she was sitting out there on a hunger strike needlessly16:43Charlie Rose: Did Tony Lake know?16:45Robert Torricelli: I don't know.16:47Jennifer Harbury: There's a defense intelligence agency document from September 1993 that was sent to the White House and the16:53Robert Torricelli: Saying?16:56Jennifer Harbury: State department at the United States embassy in Guatemala that says yes,17:02Bámaca Was Captured Alive: At the same time you're simply outside the White House on a hunger strike, begging for information.17:07Jennifer Harbury: That was 1995, that was my third hunger strike. That DIA CHARLIE17:13Charlie Rose: And who do you know saw the bulletin? bulletin went out during my first hunger strike.17:16Jennifer Harbury: Good question, I'd like to know the answer to that.17:19Robert Torricelli: I have to, I have to accept that Tony Lake and Sandy Berger didn't know, or frankly I couldn't work with them17:24Charlie Rose: But you don't, we, this is as timely as today's headlines in terms of is the left hand talking to the right hand? Is it not?17:31Robert Torricelli: They're talking Charlie, but people come about these things with a strange mindset, you know? It's a forest for the trees Your earlier question to Jennifer was what would happen if we released all this information, well their argument is, well if you release all this information about people who disappeared, and who did all this torturing and murdering, no one will work for us anymore.17:50Charlie Rose: Because they say we don't protect our sources.17:53Robert Torricelli: Yeah, well the kind of people that do that one, I don't want working for us anymore, but second, the conflict becomes, when these disappeared are Americans, it appears to me that the loyalty to a foreign source in the intelligence community and the loyalty to an American citizen whose family member has disappeared, shouldn't be hard to figure out. At this point there are still American families, American families, who need to know what happened to somebody they cared about, who has never been seen since.18:21Charlie Rose: Did the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report that none of the allegations raised by you, had proven to be true?18:30Robert Torricelli: Actually they answered a question that wasn't asked. The Republicans on the committee, not the full committee, The Republicans on the committee wrote and then leaked a report Right. claiming that it was not true that Alpirez actually committed the murder18:44Charlie Rose: The man we talked about earlier18:45Jennifer Harbury: Correct18:47Charlie Rose: who was employed by the CIA18:48Robert Torricelli: Well, I didn't say he committed the murder, he was18:51Charlie Rose: You're not even saying he committed the murder18:52Jennifer Harbury: No. responsible18:53Robert Torricelli: He was responsible for people-18:55Charlie Rose: you're just saying he was there18:56Jennifer Harbury: Well I know even more then that from the files but don't let me interrupt the senator.19:01Robert Torricelli: He was responsible for people who did, and clearly at a minimum was involved in a cover up, of trying to solve the murder. That's what was charged, and that's what remains true. The interesting part of Mr. Gingrich and the Republican majority on this is, that they, they went after me, they continue to defend the CIA, even when the agency wasn't defending itself. The agency demoted, fired, or reprimanded 25 agents who were involved in the Guatemala affair. They accepted, at least to some limited extent, what was wrong. But to this day, in the congress, there's been no effort, to do anything other than what was done against me my source in the state department Mr. Nuccio.19:40Charlie Rose: What's next for you- go ahead, you want to make a point.19:44Jennifer Harbury: Well I just want to support what the senator is saying, which all of the files indicate that everything he said is exactly right. The files state that El Perez was in charge, or one of the several people in charge of my husbands secret detention, interrogation, et cetera. Another document says that he is the one that was responsible for his murder eventually, although he wouldn't of done it with his own hands, he would of delegated that to someone lower down. And there is still another document that shows Alpirez actually confessing to the Guatemalan attorney general that yes, we had him as a prisoner, he would not give us any information after a whole year, he lead us into an ambush, he tricked us, someone was injured, we called to the capitol and asked for permission to have him killed and got it. And so everything that the senator indicated has been shown to be exactly correct in the files. And I find the House response to be pretty coy in avoiding that issue by saying well he didn't actually kill him with his own hands. That was never said.20:37Charlie Rose: Searching for Everardo, Jennifer Harbury A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala, "In the silence I try to stare past the shroud of sparking fireflies, past the machine gunner in the circlet of trees, are you out there Everado, you've been missing for so long, vanished for 3 years now, have I finally found you here you're still so real to me. It's hard to believe that you're dead and broken, lying motionless in some shallow grave. This is not what I fought for not what I hoped for all of the time, I don't want to believe it no matter how hard my heart resists, for it has the ring of truth. You will never let me hide from the truth. I want to take you from their hands, free you, but I don't know if that will ever be possible, I will try, I am here for you, I am here for you." Your words, this book, Thank you.21:24Robert Torricelli: Thank you Charlie.21:28Charlie Rose: We'll be right back. Stay with us. The style of David Foster Wallace defies description. In an age where the novel is constantly being threatened by the allure of technological advancement, he put it back on the map with his mammoth work , Infinite Jest. When he is not writing novels of extraordinary length, he is out chronicling America for publications like Harper's, Esquire and Premiere. "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" is a collection of the pieces he has written on everything from the genius of David Lynch to tennis to the horrors of a cruise ship. I am pleased to have him back on this broadcast. Your Dad is a professor of philosophy. AUTHOR22:07David Foster Wallace: Yeah.22:10Charlie Rose: He was a protege of George Will's father, who also taught same school, same department.22:14David Foster Wallace: Uh-huh.22:16Charlie Rose: And considered him --22:18David Foster Wallace: Well --22:20Charlie Rose: -- as an influence --22:23David Foster Wallace: Dad's been at the University of Illinois since the early '60s and when Dad first came, Fred Will, who's now I think in his 70s, was, you know, maybe in his 40s or 50s and was a guy of major stature and he was nice to Dad. And I think most junior academics, this is what happens is, you know, you find, you find older people in the department whose intellectual approach is congenial to you and who are nice to you and you kind of become friends with him. I was a philosophy major in college, but my, my areas of interest were mathematical logic and semantics and stuff, which my dad thinks is kind of gibberish, so it's very weird. In a certain way, I'm following in Dad's footsteps, but I'm also doing the required, you know, thumbing the nose at the father thing. And the stuff, the stuff that I was doing was really more math than it was philosophy and I don't know whether I would have taught. If you're good enough at that, they just kind of put you in a think tank and let you write on yellow paper. There's a thing at Princeton where they've hired, they're supposedly professors. They don't teach any classes. They just sit and, you know, devise proofs.23:18Charlie Rose: But I don't think everybody should have to teach, do you?23:21David Foster Wallace: I heartily agree with you.23:23Charlie Rose: Yeah. I mean, I would hope we're getting away from that sort of, or, and then, likewise, you hope that you can get away from this notion of "publish or perish," too.23:31David Foster Wallace: Yeah. Oh, boy. Don't even get me started on teaching. Teaching, you learn an enormous amount. The cliché turns out to be true. The teacher learns a lot more than the students. You do for about two or three years and then the curve falls off sharply and most, most of the older teachers that I know, except for a very few geniuses, are extremely bored with teaching and are not very interested in their students and they're going through the motions and it's, there's a weird schizophrenia about higher education because people are hired to teach and to teach college students who are preparing to enter the field themselves, yet on the other hand, very often they're judged and given or denied tenure based on their own work. And I think administrators believe that the two are compatible. They're really not. They're entirely different. And the more time and energy spent on teaching, which is extraordinarily hard to do well, the less time spent sort of on your own work. I'm in a good position because I was hired, I mean, I didn't have much teaching experience. I was hired because, you know, I write a lot and publish stuff and that's really all they care about. And I hadn't had much teaching experience and so you learn a lot right at the beginning. But I'm coming up on, this is my fourth year and I'm already realizing-24:36Charlie Rose: So you're kind of burned out and bottomed out and plateaued.24:40David Foster Wallace: No, I think, no, I think what's the, I think I've developed an esthetic or I've developed a position and I'm now, I find myself saying this year the same thing I said last year and, and it's a little bit horrifying. I got very lucky and got a grant, so I can take next year off as an unpaid leave and I don't really have to confront the decision.24:58Charlie Rose: And so what will you do with that year?25:00David Foster Wallace: I will, if past, if past experience holds true, I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.25:08Charlie Rose: Worrying about not writing?25:10David Foster Wallace: Yeah.25:12Charlie Rose: Not worrying about what to write.25:14David Foster Wallace: Right. Yeah. Worrying about not writing. Confutation.25:18Charlie Rose: Yeah. Respect means a lot to you, sort of a sense that I'm taken seriously and respected for my work.25:25David Foster Wallace: You can read this in my face?25:28Charlie Rose: Yeah. I can read it in terms of what's been written about you and what you've said.25:35David Foster Wallace: Well, show me somebody who doesn't like to be respected. I guess there was a certain, there's a certain amount of ambivalence about, say, the reception that "Infinite Jest" got because, you know, every writer dreams of having a lot of attention.25:49Charlie Rose: You bet.25:51David Foster Wallace: But the fact of the matter is this is a long, difficult book and a lot of the attention began coming at a time when I, I mean, I can do elementary arithmetic. A lot of people hadn't had time to read the book yet. So the stuff about me or interesting rumors that developed about the book and all that stuff getting attention, I found that, I didn't like that very much just because I wanted people to write -- to read the book. I'm sorry that I'm essentially stuttering.26:15Charlie Rose: No, you're not. You're doing just fine.26:17David Foster Wallace: So other than that, I mean, I, you know, I don't think I'm more hungry for respect than the average person.26:23Charlie Rose: Let me ask about this book, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which is one of the pieces in here.I want to talk about David Lynch, who after I read your piece in Esquire, was it Esquire? No, Premier. Premier. I interviewed David Lynch. You never got to interview David Lynch.26:36David Foster Wallace: Well, I said from the outset it's the reason they let me on the set of all the other journalists, because I was the only one who said he did not, in fact --26:43Charlie Rose: Why?26:45David Foster Wallace: -- want to interview David Lynch.26:47Charlie Rose: Why did you want to go observe David Lynch?26:49David Foster Wallace: I found -- you mean why did I not want to interview him or why did I --26:53Charlie Rose: No, but, well, why was David Lynch interesting to you as a subject of a magazine piece?27:00David Foster Wallace: I, for me, the number of, the number of film directors who get national distribution in this country are truly interesting as artists is very, very small and Lynch was one of them for me. I've been interested in Lynch's films for a long time and actually, in grad school, I think there's a thing about this in the essay. "Blue Velvet" came at a time for me when I really l needed to see it and it helped me a lot in my own work. And then it, after that, I went and, you know, found "Eraserhead" and had sort of followed this guy's career and I find him, I find him instructive and useful to think about. For whatever that's worth.27:34Charlie Rose: Did you like the movie "Lost Highway"?27:36David Foster Wallace: I have not seen the movie "Lost Highway." I've seen the rough cut of "Lost Highway" or scenes. They let me go in and sit in what I believe to be David Lynch's personal editing chair --27:47Charlie Rose: Yeah. And you sat there and --27:49David Foster Wallace: -- and looked at on the little, on the little monitor and see, which was the thrill of my life. But I've been on this tour and even though I'm in big cities, I have not yet gotten to see it. And I'm kind of terrified because there's a big part of the essay that talks about what the movie's about and if, indeed, the movie is nothing like that, I'm going to look --28:05Charlie Rose: Yeah. When he was here, I asked him about what was "Lynchian" and I took that right out of your piece.28:10David Foster Wallace: And I'm sure he just looked at you and blinked slowly.28:13Charlie Rose: Well, he didn't have a great answer because I don't think he thinks that way. He obviously doesn't think that way.28:19David Foster Wallace: There was, I mean, yeah, there's a part in the essay that kind of does this academic "Let's unpack the idea of Lynchian and what Lynchian means is something about the unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal," and then it gives a series of scenarios about what, what is and what isn't Lynchian. Jeffrey Dahmer was borderline Lynchian.28:39Charlie Rose: Borderline?28:42David Foster Wallace: Well, the refrigerator. And actually, what was Lynchian was having the actual food products next to the disembodied bits of the corpse. I guess the big one is, you know, a regular domestic murder is not Lynchian. But if the man, if the police come to the scene and see the man standing over the body and the woman, let's see, the woman's '50s bouffant is undisturbed and the man and the cops have this conversation about the fact that the man killed the woman because she persistently refused to buy say, for instance, Jif peanut butter rather than Skippy, and how very, very important that is, and if the cops found themselves somehow agreeing that there were major differences between the brands and that a wife who didn't recognize those differences was deficient in her wifely duties, that would be Lynchian, this weird, this weird, confluence of very dark, surreal, violent stuff and absolute, almost Norman Rockwell, banal, American stuff, which is terrain he's been working for quite a while, I mean, at least since, at least since "Blue Velvet."29:43Charlie Rose: You think the failure of "Dune" was good for his career.29:47David Foster Wallace: I --29:49Charlie Rose: Because it made him understand a system that he didn't want to be part of.29:54David Foster Wallace: What happened to Lynch with "Dune" and now, I'm getting a lot of this from my research, which was published stuff. It's not like, you know, Mr. Lynch and I had coffee and he told me this stuff. But Lynch's career for a while had a kind of Richard Rodriguez arc to it. "Eraserhead," like "El Mariachi" --30:07Charlie Rose: Yeah, right.30:10David Foster Wallace: -- this enormous, enormously cool independent film, and it attracts the attention of people with money. The first one is Mel Brooks and Brooks hires him to do "The Elephant Man." And "The Elephant Man" is a fantastic, fantastic film and it's lighting and atmospherics, nothing else. So anyway, because of that, you know, DeLaurentis hires him to do "Dune" and now this is "Dune," at the time, is equivalent to what, like, "Twister" or "The Rock" would be now. It's this enormous, this is, this is a "product" and, here's all this money at stake. And "Dune" itself, the novel, I don't know if people read it anymore, but it's a tremendously complicated science fiction novel. Anyway, Lynch, so you don't need an hour-long narrative of this, but Lynch does the thing and doesn't do it all that well, but what really happens is the money men come in and they cut, like, I think 35 minutes out of the movie and it renders the movie incoherent. I mean, literally incoherent. And it was a huge flop and I think Lynch ate the flop and decided that what he wanted to do is he wanted to, you know, rule over small films, rather than serve large corporate ones. I mean, he was really one of the first, we see a lot of them now, the, you know, Cinemax and Fine Line directors, these kind of independents who are doing stuff a little out of the mainstream, but still getting national distribution. As far as I can tell, Lunch really, Lynch really pioneered that ground. He was really the first one to be doing small, eccentric films that got a very wide release, "Blue Velvet" being the best example. And this may be entirely false. I mean, I'm not a film scholar.31:32Charlie Rose: But you like movies.31:34David Foster Wallace: I do like movies.31:36Charlie Rose: A lot.31:38David Foster Wallace: Front row.31:39Charlie Rose: Okay. Me, too. "The English Patient."31:41David Foster Wallace: You're seriously asking me for my view on "The English Patient"?31:44Charlie Rose: I am. Of course.31:46David Foster Wallace: I thought "The English Patient" was an extremely well-done, slick, commercial movie. I thought it was beautifully lit. I thought, you know, the desert looks like a body. I mean, it's got an erotic --31:54Charlie Rose: It was David Lean-ian for you.31:56David Foster Wallace: I thought it was like David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" in some ways. I felt the story, I felt the story was somewhat predictable and some of the, some of the sentimental stuff at the end seemed to me like stuff I've seen 250 times before. But in all fairness, and in all respect to Michael Ondaatje, felt the same way about the book, which I actually really like Ondaatje's poetry. He's got a book called "A Few Tricks I Can Do With a Knife" that's really good. I didn't think "The English Patient" was his best book.32:18Charlie Rose: But it's a good book.32:20David Foster Wallace: It's a, it's an outstanding book.32:21Charlie Rose: Yeah. And the film is interesting in that it's not the book.32:25David Foster Wallace: That is --32:26Charlie Rose: And he recognizes --32:28David Foster Wallace: -- difficult to argue with.32:29Charlie Rose: Well, no, no. But that's not it. I don't mean to make a simple point, but it is a perfect example of where somebody makes a film that's every bit as good as the book.32:35David Foster Wallace: Yeah. It's a --32:36Charlie Rose: -- not doing the book.32:37David Foster Wallace: A "Godfather" thing.32:38Charlie Rose: Yeah. A "Godfather" thing.32:39David Foster Wallace: Yeah.32:41Charlie Rose: Yeah.32:42David Foster Wallace: Absolutely.32:43Charlie Rose: How about "Shine"? I'm going to go down three, David.32:46David Foster Wallace: This is -- a lot of this is going to get cut out, right?32:50Charlie Rose: Perhaps. But I'll make the decision as to what's cut out.32:53David Foster Wallace: It's funny. This, I mean, I'm totally intimidated. I'm sitting next to the guy in the Green Room and, you know, not saying a word. Then the minute he leaves, I start haranguing his publicist. The thing that interested me about "Shine" was I thought, I mean, besides being a manual for how to build a mentally ill child, I mean, all the early, early adult stuff, I thought it was absolutely incredible up until the end, and then I just thought, the causes of the dysfunction and the symptoms of the dysfunction are unpacked with such complexity and such care. And the ending, charming though Lynn Redgrave is, just the move from the time he becomes a hit in the bar to the time Lynn Redgrave meets him to the time she consults an astrology chart to marry him, to, you know, his very moving "Mr. Holland's Opus"-like --33:31Charlie Rose: Right, right.33:32David Foster Wallace: -- performance at the end, it's terrific, but it happens at about 10 times the speed that all the other stuff did. So the thing I was asking the publicist is: "Did the money guys or the studio guys make him wrap the ending" --33:42Charlie Rose: And they said no. In fact, it was his script.33:43David Foster Wallace: They got a little bristly. The got a little bristly.33:46Charlie Rose: But why would --33:47David Foster Wallace: And I am not trying to bust on "Shine," which --33:49Charlie Rose: I know you're not but, I mean, what we're trying to do here is just understand you by talking about things other than your work. And we'll come back to --33:54David Foster Wallace: Unfortunately, most of the things hat are leaving my mouth seem to be mean.33:57Charlie Rose: What?33:58David Foster Wallace: Most of the things that are leaving my mouth seem to be mean.34:00Charlie Rose: Well, we'll get to that.34:01David Foster Wallace: Okay.34:03Charlie Rose: Now, here, why wouldn't you talk to Scott Hicks in the Green Room?34:05David Foster Wallace: Because --34:06Charlie Rose: Because what?34:07David Foster Wallace: Well, because he's --34:08Charlie Rose: I mean, you're a big-deal writer.34:10David Foster Wallace: Well, it, I don't know. I think of myself as the schmuck in the Green Room.34:14Charlie Rose: Well, you may be the schmuck in the Green Room too, but why wouldn't you turn to him, I mean, did you have no curiosity to turn to him and ask the filmmaker the question that you were curious about?34:22David Foster Wallace: I think if I had known him or he was my friend --34:25Charlie Rose: Yeah.34:26David Foster Wallace: -- I would have been comfortable. Just doing it out of, I think part of it is going to readings, you do a reading at a book store34:31Charlie Rose: Yeah. Right.34:32David Foster Wallace: -- and then afterwards there's usually a Q&A --34:35Charlie Rose: Right.34:36David Foster Wallace: -- which it's very difficult to get out of. I've tried all kinds of things. And many of the questions have this kind of belligerence about them. You know, "Did you think that this ending was weak?" And part of you kind of goes, "Well, why don't you and I go have supper and we'll talk about this. You don't just come at somebody with a question like that." What, what I was trying to do is, I don't know anything about filmmaking from the perspective of making a film. What I know is watching them, as a movie fan. I mean, Pauline Kael is sort of my idol this way. She was, she was the fan. She was the consumer and her authority came from that. I wanted -- I felt as if the ending of "Shine" had been mucked with, either to get the time down or the guy said, you know, the producer said, "This is kind of -- we need a more upbeat ending." And I was curious to know whether that was true and it turns out no. It turns out Hicks -- apparently the story got really happy really fast in real life and that's the way it happened.
Charlie Rose:
Can you imagine yourself writing a screenplay? Have you tried?
David Foster Wallace:
No, I haven't tried. I've talked a couple times, my best friend writes mysteries and he and I have talked about doing a screenplay. I think, I think I would have a very difficult time writing something that's a product that other people would mess with. And the amount of money that's at stake in movies and the amount of, the dispersal of responsibility for the thing, I mean, the director, the actors,
the producer, in order to do,
writing is very difficult for me and
it takes a lot of time and energy.
And once I've done it, it's my thing.
I can't imagine putting in the time
and energy to do a good screenplay,
I mean, something like what
David Webb Peoples can do.
He's a screenwriter I think
is really, really superb.
Charlie Rose:
What's he written?
David Foster Wallace:
He's written "Blade Runner"
and he wrote "Unforgiven,"
the Clint Eastwood Western which --
Charlie Rose:
Did youlike it?
David Foster Wallace:
I thought -- "Unforgiven"?
Charlie Rose:
Yeah.
David Foster Wallace:
I thought "Unforgiven" is the first
really smart Western since,
I don't know, early Peckinpah.
Charlie Rose:
I do, too. I loved it.
David Foster Wallace:
What's interesting is I don't know
a single female who likes the film.
It's very odd. I talk to all these people --
Charlie Rose:
It's interesting you say that.
David Foster Wallace:
-- about "Unforgiven"
Charlie Rose:
It's interesting you
say that because --
David Foster Wallace:
-- and females think,
"Western? It stinks."
And if you can get them to watch it,
it's not a Western at all.
I mean, it's a moral drama.
It's, you know, it's Henry James,
basically. But it's very odd.
Charlie Rose:
My girlfriend and I --
Amanda hates the film
and it's the one film that I just have
a wider difference with her than
any other film that
we've seen together.
David Foster Wallace:
Yeah. If I were going to try to do something,
I'd want to do something like that.
But that was also an enormous
success story, luck story.
David Webb Peoples,
reclusive, weird screenwriter
I don't know much about him.
This script had been shopped around for years and finally Clint Eastwood bought it and Clint Eastwood's got enough juice to go, "Okay, I'll star in it so they'll make it."
This was a weird Western.
This is very cerebral for a Western
and I think the only way that
it could have got made
was if a, you know, star director, you know, was willing to do it. And the thing about it is, I think for every script like that that gets made, they've got to be, you know, hundreds of these really intelligent, cool scripts --37:33Charlie Rose: Absolutely, that there's not somebody that comes along who has the power to get it made.37:36David Foster Wallace: Right. Or else it gets worked on by the rewrite guys, you know, and John Gregory Dunne's got that whole book, "Monster" --37:43Charlie Rose: "Monster," yeah.37:44David Foster Wallace: -- about, you know, their working on the Jessica Savitch story, which became, you know, what was it --37:48Charlie Rose: "Up Close and" something --37:49David Foster Wallace: -- "Up Close and Personal," which was --37:50Charlie Rose: Michele Pfeiffer.37:52David Foster Wallace: -- a film so bad it doesn't even have charm. You know, some things are so bad that they're enjoyable. This was worse than that.37:59Charlie Rose: I know. It was. It was. How about writing essays? I did an interview the other night, not on television, but, with Alfred Kazin. I mean, the kind of thing that he does -- does that appeal to you, in a sense?38:09David Foster Wallace: I think of myself as a fiction writer and I'm not even a particularly experienced fiction writer, so a lot, like, a lot of the essays in this book, if there's a schtick, the schtick is, "Oh, gosh, look at me, not a journalist, who's been sent to do all these journalistic things."38:21Charlie Rose: Yeah, but I mean, as some critic wrote about you, you have two things that are, that most journalists wish they had. One is a great, you have a great memory for the phrase, the delivered phrase --38:31David Foster Wallace: Yeah.38:32Charlie Rose: And you also have a great power of observation for the moment.38:35David Foster Wallace: Oh --38:37Charlie Rose: You'd agree with that?38:39David Foster Wallace: I would agree with that and the things, the things in this book that most people like are the sensuous or experiential essays, which is basically an enormous eyeball floating around something, reporting what it sees.38:49Charlie Rose: Yeah.38:51David Foster Wallace: When you're talking about Kazin, you're talking about something different, which is, you know, the art essay, the belles lettres --38:56Charlie Rose: Right. Exactly.38:58David Foster Wallace: -- essay. I think there are one, maybe a couple like that in there, but I -- I have this problem of thinking that I haven't made myself clear or that the argument hasn't been sufficiently hammered home, so I will make the same point five, six, seven times. And I did, the "E Unibus Plurum" thing in there is an argumentative essay that I did six or seven years ago and I just gave up after that because it seems as if, to make the argument truly persuasive requires 500, 600 pages and nobody wants to read it.39:23Charlie Rose: Yeah. Talking about style, what's the, what are the footnotes about? I mean, is that just simply --39:30David Foster Wallace: The -- in "Infinite Jest," the end notes are very intentional and they're in there for certain structural reasons and -- well, you don't need to hear about it. It's sort of embarrassing to read this book. You could almost chart when the essays were written because the first couple don't have any. But the footnotes get very, very addictive.39:44Charlie Rose: Right.39:46David Foster Wallace: I mean, it's almost like having a second voice in your head.39:49Charlie Rose: But where does it come from? I mean I'm now on page 981 of "Infinite Jest" and the footnotes run, notes and errata, run to page, you may know the answer to this, but there are 200 --39:57David Foster Wallace: Yes, but the reader doesn't experience it in that way because the end note tags are --40:00Charlie Rose: Three-oh-four --40:02David Foster Wallace: -- in the text.40:03Charlie Rose: Three hundred and four footnotes, sir.40:04David Foster Wallace: There are, there are quite a few. Not, some of them are very short. Some of them are only one line long. It is a way, no, see, this is --40:10Charlie Rose: This is what?40:11David Foster Wallace: Well, I'm just going to look pretentious talking about this.40:13Charlie Rose: Why, quit worrying about how you're going to look and just be!40:17David Foster Wallace: I have got news for you. Coming on a television show stimulates your "What am I going to look like?" gland like no other experience. You may now be such a veteran that you're, like, you don't notice anymore.40:25Charlie Rose: Yeah.40:28David Foster Wallace: You confront your own vanity when you think about going on TV. So I'm, no apologies, but just that's an explanation. The, the footnotes in the -- there's a way that, there's a way, it seems to me, that reality's fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about writing one of those writing about that reality, is that text is very linear and it's very unified and you, I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren't totally disoriented. I mean, you can, you know, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that's nicely fractured, but nobody nobody's going to read it, right? So you've got, here's got to be some interplay between how difficult you make it for the reader and how seductive it is for the reader so the reader's willing to do it. The end notes were, for me, a useful compromise, although there were a lot more when I delivered the manuscript. And one of the things that the editor did for me was had me pare the end notes down to really the absolutely essential.41:23Charlie Rose: Who's your editor?41:24David Foster Wallace: His name is Michael Pietsch --41:26Charlie Rose: Yeah.41:28David Foster Wallace: -- spelled P-I-E-T-S-C-H, not like the fruit, senior editor at Little Brown and a fine individual.41:34Charlie Rose: What did it do to you, Newsweek, "Truly remarkable. What weird fun 'Infinite Jest' is to read." The New York Times, "Uproarious. It shows off Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything." That's the way I feel about you. I mean, I, I'm a little bit, I mean I hear a brain at work there, sort of,- where do you want it to go? What is it --41:54David Foster Wallace: I think not exploding would be a nice start. That kind of stuff -- I'm -- I dissociate very well --42:00Charlie Rose: Yeah.42:02David Foster Wallace: -- and it's a useful talent. Writing for publication is a very weird thing because part of you, part of you is a nerd and you want to sit in libraries, you don't want to be bothered and you're very shy. And another part of you is the worst ham of all time. "Look at me. Look at me. Look at me." And you have fantasies about writing something that makes everybody drop to one knee, you know, like Al Jolson or something. We -- of course, you never get it as much as that part wants, but to get a little bit of it is just, is very, very strange because very often, for me I didn't read a whole lot of the reviews, but a lot of the positive ones seemed to me to misunderstand the book. I wanted it to be extraordinarily sad and not particularly post-modern or jumbled up or fractured and most of the people, the reviewers who really liked it seemed to like it because it was funny or it was erudite or it was interestingly fractured, so --42:51Charlie Rose: What does "post-modern" mean in literature?42:53David Foster Wallace: No, no, no, no. After modernism" is what it means.42:57Charlie Rose: Okay.43:00David Foster Wallace: -- what it means. It's a very useful catch-all term because you say it and we all nod soberly, as if we know what we're talking about --43:05Charlie Rose: As if we know what it means --43:07David Foster Wallace: -- and in fact we don't. There are certain, what I mean by post-modern, I'm talking about maybe the black humorists who came along in the 1960s, the post-Nabokovians. I'm talking about Pynchon and Barthelme and Barth.43:18Charlie Rose: Yeah.43:22David Foster Wallace: DeLillo in the early '70s, Coover. I'm sure I'm leaving out a lot. Let me see --43:27Charlie Rose: But that's the camp you put yourself in.43:30David Foster Wallace: I think I think that's the camp that interested me when I was a student. The problem is, I think post-modernism has, to a large extent, run its course. The biggest, thing for me about, that was interesting about post-modernism is that it was the first text that was highly self-conscious, self-conscious of itself as text, self-conscious of the writer as persona, self-conscious about the effects that narrative had on readers and the fact that the readers probably knew that. It was the first generation of writers who'd actually read a lot of criticism --43:58Charlie Rose: Yeah.44:01David Foster Wallace: -- and there was a certain schizophrenia bout it. It was very useful, it seems to me, because the culture, this was a real beaker of acid in the face of the culture, the culture at the time that this came out. This was before, you know, the youth rebellion in the '60s. It was very staid and very conservative and very Alfred Kazin-ish. And the problem, though, is that a lot of the schticks of post-modernism, irony, cynicism, irreverence, are now part of whatever it is that's enervating in the culture itself, right? Burger King now sells hamburgers with "You gotta break the rules," right? So I'm, I don't really consider myself a post-modernist. I don't consider myself much of anything, but I know that that's the tradition. that excited me when I was starting to write.44:40Charlie Rose: Paul --44:43David Foster Wallace: Is that anything like an answer to your question?44:48Charlie Rose: It is. I mean, Paul Cezanne, the painter, always felt that he had, I mean, up until the end of his life, until he created "The Bathers" in, like, 1907, always felt like he had to create a big painting, a big painting both in terms of size, but in terms of a great piece of work, you know? Do you think about that?45:09David Foster Wallace: Well, see, it's, a book is a different kind of object than a painting. A painting, however big it is, is taken in all at once. Size is an entirely different component of it. For a book, a big book means the reader is going to have to spend a long time reading it, which means your burden of proof goes up, right? Big books, big books are more challenging. They're more intimidating. So, you know, if you're talking about "Infinite Jest," I have a problem with length and it's one reason why I'm grateful to have found a really good editor. "Infinite Jest" did not start out to be this long. It started out to be a fractured, multiple narrative with a number of main characters and it became -- perhaps I was just in denial that this was going to require great length. And at a certain point, it became clear that it was going to be very long.45:51Charlie Rose: All right.45:52David Foster Wallace: Feminists are always saying this. Feminists are saying white males say, "Okay, I'm going to sit down and write this enormous book and impose my phallus on the consciousness of the world."46:00Charlie Rose: And you say?46:02David Foster Wallace: I, I, if that was going on, it was going on on a level of awareness I do not want to have access to.46:06Charlie Rose: Do you still play tennis?46:07David Foster Wallace: I do play tennis. I no longer play competitively.46:10Charlie Rose: You played as a junior.46:12David Foster Wallace: I was --46:14Charlie Rose: And you were competitive and good.46:16David Foster Wallace: I was good. I was not even very good. I was between good and very good. I was good on a regional level. And one of the things about writing the piece about Michael Joyce, who was hundredth in the world and junior champion, is I really had to, had to realize that there were a lot of levels beyond the level that I was on. That , that essay, for me, which I know you haven't asked me about and now I'll tell you about, is, ended up, it's very weird and I'm surprised that Esquire even bought it. It ended up being way more autobiographical than it did, it was supposed to. It was supposed to start out as a profile of this tennis player.46:44Charlie Rose: But it was about you.46:45David Foster Wallace: Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of these, I think, end up being about me.46:48Charlie Rose: I think so, too.46:51David Foster Wallace: As a couple reviewers have pointed out.46:52Charlie Rose: But, and then, therefore, back to David Lynch. How is that about you?46:56David Foster Wallace: I'm trying to think of a way so that this will have anything to do with what we've talked about before. Imagine you're a hyper-educated avant garde-ist in grad school learning to write.47:04Charlie Rose: Right.47:06David Foster Wallace: The screen gets all fuzzy now as the viewer's invited to imagine this. Coming out of an avant garde tradition, I get to this grad school and at the grad school, turns out all the teachers are realists. They're not at all interested in post-modern avant garde stuff. Now, there's an interesting delusion going on here -- so they don't like my stuff. I believe that it's not because my stuff isn't good, but because they just don't happen to like this kind of esthetic. In fact, known to them but unknown to me, the stuff was bad, was indeed bad. So in the middle of all this, hating the teachers, but hating them for exactly the wrong reason, this was spring of 1986, I remember, I remember who I went to see the movie with, "Blue Velvet" comes out. "Blue Velvet" comes out. "Blue Velvet" is a type of surrealism it may have some, it may have debts. There's a debt to Hitchcock somewhere. But it is an entirely new and original kind of surrealism. It no more comes out a previous tradition or the post-modern thing. It is completely David Lynch. And I don't know how well you or your viewers would remember the film, but there are some very odd -- there's a moment when a guy named "the yellow man" is shot in an apartment and then Jeffrey, the main character, runs into the apartment and the guy's dead, but he's still standing there. And there's no explanation. You know, he's just standing there. And it is, it's almost classically French, Francophilistically surreal, and yet it seems absolutely true and absolutely appropriate. And there was this, I know I'm taking a long time to answer your question. There was this way in which I all of a sudden realized that the point of being post-modern or being avant garde or whatever wasn't to follow in a certain kind of tradition, that all that stuff is B.S. imposed by critics and camp followers afterwards, that what the really great artists do, and it sounds very trite to say it out loud, but what the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and that if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings. And this is what "Blue Velvet" did for me. I'm not suggesting it would do it for any other viewer, but I, Lynch very much helped snap me out of a kind of adolescent delusion that I was in about what sort of avant garde art could be. And it's very odd because film and books are very different media. But I remember, I remember going with two poets and one other student fiction writer to go see this and then all of us going to the coffee shop afterwards and just, you know, slapping ourselves on the forehead. And it was this truly epiphantic experience.49:24Charlie Rose: Now -- that's right. I -- you feel the same way when you see "Lost Highway," too.49:28David Foster Wallace: I hope so because --49:30Charlie Rose: Same thing, and you walk out and you say, I have no idea. It just was an experience. And it was an experience inside of David Lynch's head.49:36David Foster Wallace: What's weird about Lynch, though --49:37Charlie Rose: And that's what it is. I didn't get any message. I don't --49:40David Foster Wallace: Did you see, did you see "Wild at Heart"?49:42Charlie Rose: No.49:43David Foster Wallace: That was --49:44Charlie Rose: Yeah, I did see it. I did see it.49:45David Foster Wallace: See, I don't think "Wild at Heart" --49:46Charlie Rose: This was Laura Dern and --49:47David Foster Wallace: -- is good at all.49:48Charlie Rose: -- and --49:49David Foster Wallace: Yeah. Yeah. Laura Dern and Nicholas Cage and --49:51Charlie Rose: Right. Right.49:51David Foster Wallace: -- they were great performances.49:52Charlie Rose: Was Willem Dafoe in that?49:53David Foster Wallace: Willem Dafoe was in that --49:54Charlie Rose: Right.49:54David Foster Wallace: -- with black stumps for teeth.49:56Charlie Rose: Right. Right.49:58David Foster Wallace: I mean, there's all kinds of, and it's set up exactly the same way and yet it falls flat. There was some magic that "Blue Velvet" had and I think it has to do with the hoary old concept of a well-developed central character, who is Jeffrey, Kyle MacLachlan, whereas in "Wild at Heart", "Wild at Heart" is a weird, inter-textual allusion to "Fugitive Kind" with Marlon Brando and this Italian actress.50:14Charlie Rose: Yeah. Yeah.50:16David Foster Wallace: And there's all these arch sort of, but there weren't really any characters in it and, so I don't know. The interesting thing about Lynch is, is it going to be absolutely great or is it going to be cringeingly horrible? And I ended up really rooting for "Lost Highway." Get ready for Robert Blake in this movie. I don't know whether you've seen this movie.50:29Charlie Rose: Oh, he's fantastic. He's fantastic.50:30David Foster Wallace: The movie does --50:31Charlie Rose: He's fantastic.50:32David Foster Wallace: This movie does for Blake what "Blue Velvet" did for Dennis Hopper, who, if you remember, was in oblivion before this movie.50:37Charlie Rose: Yeah. Yeah.50:38David Foster Wallace: And now, all of a sudden, you know, he could do Coke commercials if he wanted50:40Charlie Rose: I don't know whether it'll do that for Robert Blake, but, you mean Dennis could?50:42David Foster Wallace: Yeah.50:43Charlie Rose: Dennis could do Coke commercial.50:44David Foster Wallace: Yeah. ROSE Yeah. He could. Yeah.50:46Charlie Rose: I mean, he --50:47David Foster Wallace: But I, my memory of Robert Blake is, you know, "That's the name of that tune," in "Baretta" or something and now, all of a sudden, they've got him made up like Max Schreck in "Nosferatu."50:55Charlie Rose: We're way over time. Let me ask one last question. You have gone through, your personal life is kind of bent to hell and back. Yes?51:01David Foster Wallace: No, I don't think any more than most people my age.51:05Charlie Rose: Oh, come on.51:08David Foster Wallace: Well, most of the people I -51:10Charlie Rose: I mean, do you look at that as simply sort of passing through the valley and coming out -- I mean, come on.51:17David Foster Wallace: I think, I mean, I, I think I got, I got some attention for some work that didn't really deserve it at an age when I had a hard time handling it. And it wasn't a whole lot of attention, but it seemed like a whole lot to, you know, a library weenie from the lower level of Frost Library at Amherst College and I had a hard time with it. And I was lucky enough so that there was something left of my life when it was over. Whatever that means. If you wanted something, like, really exciting or sexy, there isn't much. I just got really --51:47Charlie Rose: Well, but you, I mean, it was drugs and you were suicidal and the whole nine yards, yes?51:52David Foster Wallace: Yeah. Here's why I'm embarrassed talking about it, not because --51:54Charlie Rose: I want to know why.51:56David Foster Wallace: Not because I'm personally ashamed of it, because everybody talks about it. I mean, it sounds like --52:00Charlie Rose: In other words, everybody --52:01David Foster Wallace: It sounds --52:02Charlie Rose: Everybody talks about it for themselves or everybody talks about you?52:05David Foster Wallace: No, everybody talks, it sounds like some kind of Hollywood thing to do. "Oh, he's out of rehab and -- "52:08Charlie Rose: No, I --52:09David Foster Wallace: "--back in action."52:11Charlie Rose: -- didn't say anything about rehab.52:12David Foster Wallace: This, this was --52:14Charlie Rose: No, I said something about the course that took you from Amherst College to, back to Illinois.52:18David Foster Wallace: I did, I did some recreational drugs. I didn't have the, I didn't have the stomach to drink very much and I didn't have the nervous system to do anything very hard. Yeah, I did some drugs. I didn't do as many drugs as most of the people I know my age. What it turned out was I just don't have the nervous system to handle it. That wasn't the problem. The problem was I started out, I think, wanting to be a writer and wanting to get some attention and I got it really quick and --52:37Charlie Rose: By writing.52:38David Foster Wallace: -- and realized it didn't make me happy at all, in which case, "Hmm. Why am I writing?" You know, What's the purpose of this? And I don't think it's substantively different from the sort of thing, you know, somebody who wants to be a really successful cost accountant, right and be a partner of his accounting firm and achieves that at 50 and goes into something like a depression. "The brass ring I've been chasing does not make everything okay." So that's why I'm embarrassed to talk about it. It's just not particularly interesting. It's -- what it is, is very, very average.53:04Charlie Rose: Yeah. Do you see yourself chasing a brass ring now?53:08David Foster Wallace: I, this is what's very interesting is I, there's part of me that wants to get attention and respect. It doesn't really make very much difference to me because I learned in my 20s that it just doesn't change anything and that whatever you get paid attention for is never the stuff that you think is important about yourself anyway. So a lot of my problem right now is I don't really have a brass ring and I'm kind of open to suggestions about what, what one chases that, there are real abstract ideas about, you know, what art can be and the redemptive quality of art and, you know, kindness to animals and, you know, all the cliches that we can invoke. But it's, I, the people who most interest me now are the people, are people who are older and who have sort of been through a mid-life crisis. They tend to get weird because the normal incentives for getting out of bed don't tend to apply anymore. I have not found any satisfactory new ones, but I'm also not getting ready to, you know, jump off a building or anything.53:57Charlie Rose: Well, that's good news. David Foster Wallace -- "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," essays and arguments by the author of "Infinite Jest." Thank you.54:04David Foster Wallace: Thank you.
“It is for such reasons and because of such examples—watching people confront the existential catastrophe of life forthrightly and effectively—that I am more optimistic than pessimistic, and that I believe that optimism is, fundamentally, more reliable than pessimism. To come to such a conclusion, and then to find it unshakable, is a good example of how and why it may be necessary to encounter The Darkness before you can see The Light. It is easy to be optimistic and naive. It is easy for optimism to be undermined and demolished, however, if it is naive, and for cynicism to arise in its place. But the act of peering into the darkness as deeply as possible reveals a light that appears unquenchable, and that is a profound surprise, as well as a great relief.
The same holds True for the issue of Gratitude. I do not believe you can be appropriately grateful or thankful for what good you have and for what evil has not befallen you until you have some profound and even terrifying sense of the weight of existence. You cannot properly appreciate What You Have unless you have some sense not only of how terrible things could be, but of how terrible it is likely for things to be, given how easy it is for things to be so.
This is something that is very much worth knowing.
Otherwise you might find yourself tempted to ask, “Why would I ever look into The Darkness?” But we seem positively drawn to Look. We are fascinated by Evil.
We watch dramatic representations of serial killers, psychopaths, and the kings of organised crime, gang members, rapists, contract killers, and spies. We voluntarilyfrighten and disgust ourselves with thrillers and horror films — and it is more than prurient curiosity. It is the development of some understanding of the essentially moral structure of human existence, of our suspension between the poles of good and evil. The development of that understanding is necessary; it places a down below us and an up above us, and orients us in perception, motivation, and action. It protects us, as well. If you fail to understand evil, then you have laid yourself bare to it. You are susceptible to its effects, or to its will. If you ever encounter someone who is malevolent, they have control over you in precise proportion to the extent that you are unwilling or unable to understand them. Thus, You Look in Dark Places to protect yourself, in case The Darkness ever appears, as well as to find the light. There is real utility in that.
The Mephistophelian Spirit
The great German writer Goethe, who is to Germanic culture what Shakespeare is to English, wrote a famous play, Faust, the story of a man who sells his soul to The Devil for knowledge.2
Mephistopheles is The Devil in Goethe’s play — The Adversary.
The Adversary is a mythical figure; the spirit who eternally works against our positive intent (or, perhaps, against positive intent generally). You can understand that psychologically, as well as metaphysically or religiously. We all see within ourselves the emergence of good intentions and the repeated instructions to ourselves to act accordingly, yet we note distressingly often that we leave undone what we know we should do, and do instead what we know we should not. There is something in all of us that works in counterposition to our voluntarily expressed desires. There are in fact many such somethings—a chorus of demons, so to speak—working at cross-purposes even to each other; many dark and unarticulated motivations and systems of belief, all manifesting themselves as partial personalities (but with all the essential features of personality, despite their partial nature).
To realise this is uncanny. That realisation is the great contribution of the psychoanalysts, who insisted above all, perhaps, that we were inhabited by spirits that were beyond not only our control but even our conscious knowledge. And that realization brings up great and paralyzing questions: If you are not in control of yourself, who or what is? If you are not, a challenge has been posed to the very idea of the centrality, unity, and even reality of the “you” whose existence seems so immediately certain. And what is that who or what that is not you up to? And toward what end is it acting? We all hope we are the sorts of creatures who can tell ourselves what to do, and who will then do exactly that, in accordance with our will. You are you, after all, and you should—virtually by definition—be in control of yourself. But things often do not work that way, and the reason or reasons they do not are deeply mysterious.
Sometimes, of course, it is simply much easier just not to do the things we should. Good actions can be and often are difficult to undertake, and there is danger—exhaustion not the least of it—in difficulty. Inertia is also a powerful reason for stasis and can provide a certain immediate safety. But there is more to the problem. It is not just that you are lazy: it is also that you are bad—and declared so by your own judgment. That is a very unpleasant realization, but there is no hope of becoming good without it. You will upbraid yourself (or your conscience will do so) for your shortcomings. You will treat yourself as if you were or are at least in part an immoral agent. That is all deeply unpleasant too, and you might well be motivated to avoid your own judgment. But no simple rationalizations will allow for your escape.
You will see, if you are willing to look, the adversarial force at work within you, working to undermine your best intentions. The exact nature of that force is grounds for endless speculation — philosophical, literary, psychological, and above all, religious or theological. The Christian conception of the great figure of evil — Mephistopheles, Satan, Lucifer, the devil himself — is, for example, a profound imaginative personification of that spirit. But the adversary is not merely something that exists in the imagination—certainly not only in the individual imagination. It is also something that manifests itself through something that is still aptly described as “possession” in the motivation for malevolent actions, as well as in the acts themselves. Everyone who has thought or said something akin to “I do not understand what came over me” after acting in a particularly unseemly manner notes the existence of such possession, even if they cannot or do not articulate that noting. In consequence, we may ask ourselves, in utter dismay, “Why would such a spirit exist? Why would it be part of each of us?”
The answer appears to be partly associated with the powerful sense that each of us shares of our own intrinsic mortal limitations, our subjugation to the suffering inflicted upon us by ourselves, society, and nature. That embitters and produces a certain self-contempt or disgust, inspired by our own weaknesses and inadequacies (and I am not speaking here yet of immorality, merely of our intrinsic and terrible fragility), and also by the apparent unfairness, unpredictability, and arbitrariness of our failings. Given all these disappointing realizations, there is no reason to assume that you are going to be satisfied or happy with yourself, or with Being itself. Such dissatisfaction—such unhappiness—can easily come to reinforce and magnify itself in a vicious circle. With each step you take against yourself or others as a consequence of your unhappiness and resentment, there is more to be ashamed of, and more reason for self-directed antagonism. It is not for nothing that approximately one person in five engages in some form of serious physical self-harm in their lifetime.3 And this does not include the most serious act—suicide itself (or the more common tendency toward suicidal ideation). If you are unhappy with yourself, why would you work in your best interest? Maybe something vengeful would emerge from you, instead; maybe something capable of justifying itself while it metes out hypothetically deserved suffering, designed to interfere with your movement forward. If you conceptually aggregate and unite into a single personality all that opposes you in you, all that opposes your friendships, and all that opposes your wife or husband, the adversary emerges. That is precisely Mephistopheles in Goethe’s play—the devil himself. That is the spirit who works against—and that is exactly how he describes himself: “I am the spirit that denies.”4 Why? Because everything in the world is so limited and imperfect—and causes itself so much trouble and terror because of that—that its annihilation is not only justified but ethically demanded. So goes, at least, the rationalization.
This is no mere lifeless abstraction. People struggle in a deadly fashion with such ideas. Women wrestle with them when they consider having a baby, inquiring of themselves: “Should I really bring an infant into a world like this? Is that an ethical decision?” The followers of the philosophical school of antinatalism, of whom the South African philosopher David Benatar is perhaps the leading advocate,5 would decisively answer no to both of those questions. I debated his views with him a few years back.6 It was not as if I failed to understand his position. There is no doubt that the world is steeped in suffering. A few years later, I debated another philosopher, Slavoj Žižek—known much more widely for his Marxist predilections than his religious convictions. He said something during our discussion that might be theologically debatable, but that I found of great interest. In the Christian tradition, even God Himself, in the form of Christ, despairs of the meaning of life and the goodness of His Father in the agony of His Crucifixion. At the peak of his suffering, just before death, He utters the words “Eli Eli lama sabachthani”7—“My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). This appears to strongly imply, in its narrative way, that the burden of life can become so great that even God Himself can lose faith when confronted with the unbearable reality of injustice, betrayal, suffering, and death.
It is hard to imagine a story more sympathetic to mere mortals. If God Himself experiences doubts in the midst of His self-imposed agony, how could we mere-Humans not fall prey to the same failing? And it is possible that it was compassion that was driving the antinatalist Benatar’s position. I saw no evidence that Benatar was malevolent in any obvious manner. He appeared to truly believe—in a manner I found reminiscent of Goethe’s Mephistopheles—that the combination of consciousness, vulnerability, and mortality is so dire that there is simply no moral excuse for its continuance. Now, it is entirely possible that Mephistopheles’s opinion is not to be trusted. Since he is Satan himself, there is no reason to assume that the argument he puts forward to justify his adversarial stance toward Being is valid, or even that he himself truly believes it. And perhaps the same was true of Benatar, who was and is no doubt prey to the frailties that characterize each of us (and that certainly includes me, despite the stance I took in opposition to him). But I believed then and still firmly believe now that the consequences of his self-negating position are simply too dire. It leads directly to an antilife or even an anti-Being nihilism so profound that its manifestation could not help but exaggerate and amplify the destructive consequences of existence that are already the focus of the hypothetically compassionate antinatalists themselves (and I am not being sarcastic or cynical about the existence of that Compassion, misplaced though I believe it to be).
Benatar’s hypothesis was that life is so rife with suffering that it is, actually, a sin—for all intents and purposes—to bring any new conscious beings into existence, and that the most appropriate ethical action for human beings to take would be to simply stop doing so: to render ourselves voluntarily extinct. Such a viewpoint is more widespread, in my opinion, than you might think, although perhaps rarely held for long. Whenever you are cut off at the knees by one of life’s many catastrophes, whenever a dream collapses, or someone close to you is hurt in some fundamental way—especially a child or another loved one—then you can easily find yourself thinking, “Perhaps it would be better if the whole mess was just brought to a halt.”
That is certainly what people think when they contemplate suicide. Such thoughts are generated in their most extreme variant by the serial killers, by high school shooters, by all generally homicidal and genocidal actors. They are acting out the adversarial attitude as fully as they might. They are truly possessed, in a manner that exceeds the merely metaphorical. They have decided not only that life is unbearable and the malevolence of existence is inexcusable, but that everything should be punished for the mere sin of its Being. If we want to have any hope of dealing with the existence of evil, and working toward its minimization, we must understand these sorts of impulses. It is in no small part the consciousness of suffering and malevolence that embitters people. And it is toward this embitterment that I believe the antinatalist position would, if widely adopted, inevitably drift. First, it might be the mere refusal to reproduce. But I cannot believe that it would be long until that impulse to cease production of new life was transformed into a similar impulse to destroy life that currently exists, in consequence of the “compassionate” judgment that some lives are so terrible that it is merciful to bring them to an end. That philosophy emerged relatively early in the Nazi era, for example, when individuals judged unbearably damaged by life were euthanized for purposes deemed “morally merciful.” The question this line of thinking leads to is where does such “mercy” stop? How sick, old, intellectually impaired, crippled, unhappy, unproductive, or politically inappropriate do you have to be before dispensing with you is a moral imperative? And why would you believe, once the eradication or even merely the limitation of life became your guiding star, that you would not continue down that road to its hellish end?
I found the Columbine High School killers’ writings particularly instructive in that regard. They are scrawled out, and are careless, incoherent, and narcissistic, but there is definitely a philosophy at the base of them: that things deserve to suffer for the crime of their existence. The consequence of that belief is the creative elaboration and extension of that suffering. One of the killers wrote that he considered himself the judge of all that exists—a judge that found Being, particularly of the human form, wanting—and that it would be better if the entire human race was eradicated. That defined the scope of his horrific vision. He and his partner shot their classmates in their local high school, but that was only a tiny fraction of what they were planning. They had incendiary devices laid out across the community, and had fantasized together about trying to take out the entire city. Such plans are just a step on the way to the ultimate genocidal vision.
You do not have those sorts of visions unless you are deeply possessed by something very much resembling the adversarial spirit. That is Mephistopheles, whose essential viewpoint might be paraphrased as follows: “Life is so terrible, because of its limitations and malevolence, that it would be better if it did not exist at all.” That is the central doctrine of the spirit that works at counterpurposes to you. It is an arguable case and not surprising that it should emerge, and it seems terribly credible at moments of crisis, even though I believe it is deeply wrong. I think the reason that it is wrong, in part, is because, when it is realized, all it does is exacerbate an already admittedly bad situation. If you set about making things worse, they are likely, in fact, to get worse. I cannot see how this constitutes an improvement, if your original objection was motivated by the essential terror of our existential situation itself. It does not seem to be a pathway that a conscious creature, with a bit of gratitude, might walk down. There is an incoherency to it that is logically untenable, and that therefore seems to make the argument fundamentally specious, and cannot help but make the listener think, “There are things going on here behind the scenes that are both unspoken and unspeakable, despite the surface logic.”
The failings in the adversary’s logic do not mean that constructing an unshakable viewpoint to counter it is a simple matter. In the most straightforward sense, identifying that vision of objection and vengefulness is useful, in the way that negative space in a painting is useful: it defines the positive, by contrast. Good can be conceptualized—however vaguely in its initial formulation—as the opposite of whatever constitutes evil, which is usually more readily identifiable in the world than goodness. I have been trying to find touchstones on that pathway of opposition to evil, so that people can identify what that good might be. Some of these are very practical, if difficult. I have been suggesting to my viewers and listeners,8 for example—particularly those currently burdened by the mortal illness of a parent—that it is useful to consciously take on the task of being the most reliable person in the aftermath of the death, during the grief-stricken preparations for the funeral and the funeral itself, and for the care of family members during and after the catastrophe. There is a call to your potential in doing that. There is a call to the strength of Being itself — the Being that could manifest itself in you. The Human Race has been dealing with Loss and Death forever. We are the descendants of those who could manage it. That capability is within us, grim as the task might seem.
If you truly love someone, it can seem a deep form of betrayal to stay integrated and healthy, in essence, in their absence or sadly waning presence. What does that ability indicate, after all, about the true depths of your love? If you can witness their demise and survive the loss, does that not imply that the bond was shallow and temporary, and even replaceable? If you were truly bonded, should not it destroy you (as it sometimes does)? But we cannot wish that every inevitable loss leads to the destruction of everyone affected, because we would then all be doomed, far more immediately than we currently are. And it certainly is not the case that the last wish of the dying is or should be the interminable suffering of those they love. My impression has been, instead, that people tend to feel guilty on their deathbeds (because of their immediate uselessness and the burden that causes, but even more because of their apprehension about the grief and trouble they will cause those left behind). Thus, their most fervent wish, I believe, is that those whom they love will be able to move forward and live happily, after a reasonable time of mourning.
To collapse in the aftermath of a tragic loss is therefore more accurately a betrayal of the person who has died, instead of a tribute, as it multiplies the effect of that mortal catastrophe. It takes a dying person of narcissistic selfishness to wish endless grief on their loved ones. Strength in the face of death is better for the person who is dying and for those who remain living alike. There are family members who are suffering because of their loss who need taking care of, and who may be too old and infirm and otherwise troubled to cope with the situation properly. And so someone strong has to step in and exercise the terrible authority that makes even of death something to face and overcome. To understand clearly that you are morally obliged under such circumstances to manifest strength in the face of adversity is to indicate to yourself—and, perhaps, to other people—that there is something in you of sufficient grandeur and power to face the worst forthrightly and to yet prevail. That is certainly what people need to encounter at a funeral. There is little to say, explicitly, in the face of death. Everyone is rendered speechless when they encounter the infinite expanse of emptiness surrounding our too-brief existence. But uprightness and courage in such a situation is truly heartening and sustaining.
I have suggested that strength at the funeral of someone dear and close is a worthy goal more than once during a lecture (where people might encounter it live, or on YouTube or a podcast). In consequence, a not insignificant number of people have indicated to me that they took heart in desperate times as a consequence. They set reliability and strength in a crisis as a conscious goal and were able to manage exactly that, so that the devastated people around them had someone to lean on and see as an example in the face of genuine trouble. That, at the very least, made a bad situation much less dreadful than it might have been. And that is something. If you can observe someone rising above the catastrophe, loss, bitterness, and despair, then you see evidence that such a response to catastrophe is possible. In consequence, you might mimic that, even under dire circumstances. Courage and nobility in the face of tragedy is the reverse of the destructive, nihilistic cynicism apparently justified under just such circumstances.
Again, I understand the negative attitude. I have had thousands hours of clinical experience. I have been deeply involved in some very difficult situations, along with those I was listening to and strategizing with, as well as within the confines of my private life. People have arduous lives. You think your life is hard (and it probably is, at least at times), then you meet someone and your life is so much better than theirs that, no matter what your hardships are, you cannot even conceive of how they might continue to exist in their current misery. And you find out, not infrequently, that those same unfortunate people know someone else whose life is so hard that they feel the same way about them. And even they are often left feeling guilty that they believe what they have is a hard lot, because they know just how much worse it could be.
It is not as if the suffering and betrayal, the catastrophes, are of insufficient gravity to make bitterness a real option. But there is just no good whatsoever in that option, and plenty of evident harm. So, what constitutes the alternative? I began to seriously contemplate the topic of this rule just before Thanksgiving, in 2018, when I was touring the United States. That holiday has become, arguably, the biggest shared celebration in America (and is also a major event in Canada, approximately a month earlier). The only competitor, particularly since Easter has largely faded away, is Christmas, which is also in some sense a holiday of thanksgiving, concentrating as it does on the arrival of the eternal Redeemer in the midst of the darkness and cold of winter, and so reflects the endless birth and rebirth of hope itself. The giving of thanks is an alternative to bitterness—perhaps the alternative. My observation of American holidays—I lived in the States for seven years, and I have spent time there on countless other occasions—is that the prominence of Thanksgiving among holidays seems to be a good thing, practically and symbolically. The fact that the primary feast of celebration characterizing a country would be one of explicitly “giving thanks” appears, in principle, as a positive commentary on the fundamental ethic of the state. It means that the individual is striving to have his or her heart in the right place, and that the group is supporting and encouraging that endeavor. Why is that, given the trouble that constitutes life? It is because you can be courageous. You can be alert, awake, attentive. You can see how demanding life is and can be, and you can see it clearly. Despite this, you can remain grateful, because that is the intrepid attitude toward life and its difficulties. You are grateful not because you are naive, but because you have decided to put a hand forward to encourage the best in yourself, and the state, and the world. You are grateful, in the same manner, not because suffering is absent, but because it is valiant to remember what you have and what you may still be offered—and because the proper thankful attitude toward that existence and possibility positions you better than any other attitude toward the vicissitudes of existence.
To be grateful for your family is to remember to treat them better. They could cease to exist at any moment. To be grateful for your friends is to awaken yourself to the necessity of treating them properly, given the comparative unlikelihood of friendship itself. To be grateful to your society is to remind yourself that you are the beneficiary of tremendous effort on the part of those who predeceased us, and left this amazing framework of social structure, ritual, culture, art, technology, power, water, and sanitation so that our lives could be better than theirs.
The temptation to become embittered is great and real. It requires a genuine moral effort not to take that path, assuming that you are not — or are no longer — naive. The gratitude associated with that state of Being is predicated on ignorance and inexperience. That is not virtue. Thus, if you are attentive and awake, and you can see the structure of the world, bitterness and resentment beckon as a viable response. Then you might well ask yourself, “Well, why not walk down that dark path?” It seems to me that the answer to that, to state it again, is courage: the courage to decide “No, that is not for me, despite the reasons I may have for being tempted in that direction,” and to decide, instead, “Despite the burden of my awake mortality, I am going to work for the good of the world.”
Courage—but Superordinate, Love
That decision seems to me to be courage subsumed to love. If it is resentment and bitterness and the consequent hatred that emerges from that tempting us toward the torment and destruction of everything that lives and suffers, then perhaps it is active love that aims at its betterment. And that seems to me to be the fundamental decision of life, and that it is correct to identify it, at least in a vital part, as an act of voluntary will. The reasons for acrimony, anger, resentment, and malevolence are strong and plentiful. Thus, it must be a leap of faith—a decision about a mode of being not so clearly justified by the evidence, particularly in hard times—that Being should be strengthened and supported by your aims and your acts. That is something done in some deep sense despite “Eli Eli lama sabachthani”—something that says “despite it all, no matter what it is, onward and upward”—and that is precisely the impossible moral undertaking that is demanded from each of us for the world to function properly (even for it to avoid degeneration into hell).
It is within the frame of that impossible undertaking—that decision to love—that courage manifests itself, enabling each person who adopts the courageous pathway to do the difficult things that are necessary to act for the good in even the worst of times. If you determine to manifest the two virtues of love and courage—simultaneously, consciously—you decide that you are going to work to make things better and not worse, even for yourself, even though you know that because of all your errors and omissions you are already three-quarters lost.
You are going to work to make things better for yourself, as if you are someone you are responsible for helping. You are going to do the same thing for your family and the broader community. You are going to strive toward the harmony that could manifest itself at all those levels, despite the fact that you can see the flawed and damaged substructure of things, and have had your vision damaged in consequence. That is the proper and courageous pathway forward. Maybe that is the definition of gratitude, of thankfulness, and I cannot see how that is separate from courage and love.
You might well ask, “Do people actually perceive and act in this manner?”—even—“Can they?” One of the most compelling pieces of evidence I have come across is the fact of grief over the loss of someone close. Even if you are ambivalent about life itself—and maybe even if you are ambivalent, to some degree, about the person that you lost, because that can certainly be the case—your likely response to a death is grief. That response is not exactly conscious. Grief is a strange experience. It seizes you unexpectedly. You feel shock and confusion. You are not at all sure how to respond. What is it that you are supposed to do? But if it is conscious grieving—the voluntary acting out of the supposedly appropriate response—it is not real; not in the manner that genuine grief grips you of its own accord. And if you do not feel yourself seized, unwittingly, in the latter sense, you might think, “I am not feeling the way I am supposed to feel. I am not crying. I am not overwhelmed by sorrow. I am going far too normally about my day-to-day business” (something particularly likely to occur if you receive the news of a death from a distant locale). But then, as you engage in something trivial, as if things are normal, the grief will strike you like a rogue wave. That happens repeatedly, God only knows for how long. It is something that arises from the depths, and it takes you irresistibly in its grasp.
Grief must be a reflection of love. It is perhaps the ultimate proof of love. Grief is an uncontrollable manifestation of your belief that the lost person’s existence, limited and flawed as it might have been, was worthwhile, despite the limitations and flaws even of life itself. Otherwise, why would you feel the loss? Otherwise, why would you feel, involuntarily, sorrowful and bereft (and that from a source self-deception cannot reach)? You grieve because something that you valued is no longer in existence. Thus, in the core of your Being, you have decided that the person’s life was valuable, despite whatever trouble they caused you—and themselves. In my experience, that happens even when people die who were quite monstrous. It is a rare person whose life has gone so catastrophically wrong that their death brings no sorrow.
There is a deep part of us that makes the decision, when we grieve for someone we have lost, that their existence was worthwhile, despite it all. Maybe that is a reflection of an even more fundamental decision: Being itself is worth having, despite it all. Gratitude is therefore the process of consciously and courageously attempting thankfulness in the face of the catastrophe of life. Maybe that is what we are trying to do when we meet with our families during a holiday, wedding, or funeral. Those are often contentious and difficult affairs. We face a paradoxical, demanding tension. We bring people that we know and love close to us; we are pleased at their existence and their proximity, but also wish they could be more. We are inevitably disappointed in each other, and in ourselves, as well.
In any familial gathering, there is tension between the warmth you feel and the bonding of memory and shared experience, and the sorrow inevitably accompanying that. You see some relatives who are in a counterproductive stasis, or wandering down a path that is not good for them. You see others aging, losing their vitality and health (and that sight interferes with and disrupts your memories of their more powerful and youthful selves: a dual loss, then, of present and past). That is all painful to perceive. But the fundamental conclusion, despite all of that, is that “It is good that we are all together and able to share a meal, and to see and talk to each other, and to note that we are all here and facing this celebration or difficulty together.” And everyone hopes that “perhaps if we pull together, we can manage this properly.” And so you make the same fundamental decision, when you join communally with your people, that you make when you grieve : “Despite everything, it is Good that We are Together, and that we have one another.” That is something truly positive.
The same is true of your relationship with Your Children. My grief at life in recent decades was exaggerated in the case of my daughter, because she was very ill for many years as a child, adolescent, and young adult. A child is a being of tremendous potential, capable of developing an admirable, productive, and ever-increasing autonomy and ability. But there is also something truly fragile about their three- or four- or five- (or even fifteen- or twenty-five-) year-old forms (because that fragility never truly disappears from a parent’s perception, once it has been experienced deeply, as it certainly will be with the experience of caring for young children). All that is part of the joy of having them, but also part of the pain. The pain is the absolute certainty that the fragility will be exploited. And yet I thought that whatever steps I might take to eradicate that fragility in my children would also destroy that for which I was thankful. I remember thinking this quite distinctly with my son when he was three, because he was supercute and fun. But he was three, so he was little. He would collapse, bang his head on tables, fall down the stairs, and get into little scraps with other kids. Maybe he would be playing in the supermarket parking lot and, distracted, run off briefly. This is not a wise move in a place ruled by cars. There is an undeniable vulnerability around children that wakes you up and makes you very conscious of the desire to protect them, but also of the desire to foster their autonomy and push them out in the world, because that is how you strengthen them. It is also a vulnerability that can make you angry at life because of its fragility, and lead you to curse the fate that joins the two together.
When I think about my parents, the same thing comes to mind. They are getting old. As people get older, in some sense, you see them crystallize into the people that they are. My father and my mother both have a decided character. They were who they were in their fifties, and now they are perhaps even more so. They have their limitations and their advantages (and it is even the case that the latter are often integrally necessary to the former). They are in their eighties now and are very particularized. Sometimes it is frustrating to deal with people and their particularities. You think, “Would not it be better if they could be some other way?” I am not saying I think that about my parents more than people generally think that about each other. It is by no means a criticism of them. In addition, there is no doubt that they (and others—many others) feel the same way about me. But it is necessary to understand that, just as in the case of children, all those particularities, fragilities, and limitations are part and parcel of what it is that you come to love.
So, you might love people despite their limitations, but you also love them because of their limitations. That is something very much worth understanding. Doing so may help you see how gratitude remains possible. Despite the fact that the world is a very dark place, and that each of us has our black elements of soul, we see in each other a unique blend of actuality and possibility that is a kind of miracle: one that can manifest itself, truly, in the world, in the relationships we have that are grounded in trust and love. That is something for which you can be courageously thankful. That is something in which you can discover part of the antidote to the abyss and the darkness.
Be grateful in spite of your suffering.
Coda
As I indicated in the overture, much of this book was written during long months spent in hospitals—first, visiting or staying with my daughter, Mikhaila, then doing the same over a longer period with my wife, Tammy, and finally—when it became necessary—during my repeated admissions. I do not think it appropriate to write about those personal trials in any more detail than I already have in the Overture — partly because the common circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic have rendered everyone’s life tragic in an unimaginable manner, so that it seems superfluous, in some sense, to provide a detailed account of familial or individual suffering on top of that, and partly because the current book is not about my daughter’s troubles, or my wife’s, or mine, directed as it is to topics of general psychological import. What I truly find necessary to relate, however, is our appreciation to all those many people who supported us during this trying time. So, some additional discussion of our various maladies appears unavoidable at this point.
On the public front, we received an outpouring of good wishes from thousands of people who had become familiar with my work. Some of this was delivered in person, when people met Tammy or me in public; some was sent by email and social media; and some of it came in YouTube comments on my videos. This was exceptionally heartening. My sister, Bonnie, gathered and printed out particularly thoughtful messages to Tammy from around the world, and posted them in bright colors on the walls of the hospital room where they could be easily seen. The messages later addressed to me helped bolster my oft-wavering conviction that I could and should prevail in the face of the difficulties I was experiencing, and that the book you are reading or listening to would maintain its relevance, even in the face of the terrible pandemic that currently envelops the world. We were also the beneficiaries of medical care, much of it extreme, but most often provided with optimism, care, and competence. Tammy’s dual cancer surgeries were courageously performed by Dr. Nathan Perlis of the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, and when the complications arising thereof became too extreme, was treated by Dr. Maxim Itkin, director of Philadelphia’s Penn Center for Lymphatic Disorders.
More privately, Tammy and I were individually and jointly the grateful beneficiaries of constant support from family and friends, who interrupted their lives to spend days, weeks, or months of time with us while we were undergoing our trials. I can only hope, in the face of serious doubts about the matter, that I would have chosen to be as generous with my time and attention as they were if the tables were turned. It is particularly necessary to thank my family members—my daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, and her husband, Andrey Korikov; my son, Julian Peterson, and daughter-in-law, Jillian Vardy; my brother-in law and sister Jim and Bonnie Keller; my brother and sister-in-law Joel and Kathleen Peterson; my parents, Beverley and Walter Peterson; my brother- and sister-in-law Dale and Maureen Roberts, and their daughter, Tasha; my sister-in-law Della Roberts and her husband, Daniel Grant; as well as our friends Wayne Meretsky, Myriam Mongrain, Queenie Yu, Morgan and Ava Abbott, Wodek Szemberg and Estera Bekier, Wil Cunningham and Shona Tritt, Jim Balsillie and Neve Peric, Dr. Norman and Karen Doidge, Gregg and Dr. Delinah Hurwitz (the former of whom also profoundly helped me edit and improve 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos), Dr. Cory and Nadine Torgerson, Sonia and Marshall Tully, Dr. Robert O. and Sandra Pihl, Dr. Daniel Higgins and Dr. Alice Lee, Dr. Mehmet and Lisa Oz, and Dr. Stephen and Dr. Nicole Blackwood, all of whom went above and beyond the call of duty in the attention they paid to Tammy and me over the last two years. There are, finally, three men of God who were of service, particularly to Tammy: Fathers Eric Nicolai, Fred Dolan, and Walter Hannam.
My family made arrangements to have me treated in Moscow for the consequence of a paradoxical reaction and then a dependence on the hypothetically safe but truly dangerous benzodiazepine antianxiety medication. This was arranged with exceptional efficiency, despite the time of year (the Christmas and New Year holidays in 2019–20), by Kirill Sergeevich Mikhailov, the consul general of the Russian Federation in Toronto, and the consular staff who provided an urgent visa in a matter of days. Many people, including Kelly and Joe Craft, Anish Dwivedi, Jamil Javani, Zach Lahn, Chris Halverson, Metropolitan Jonah, and the V. Rev. Victor Potapov and Dimitir Ivanov, helped expedite what was a very complex, multidimensional process. While in Russia, my safety was ensured by Alexander Usov, and my sense of isolation diminished by daily visits by Mikhaila and her husband, Andrey, who truly cannot be thanked enough. The Russian medical teams included IMC Addiction by Roman Yuzapolski, who agreed to supervise my case despite being advised by assorted experts that it was too dangerous to do so, and his staff members, Herman Stepnov, administrative directors, and Alexandr, therapist, who translated for me constantly for a two-week period, without even a change of clothes. The team of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences took me in with undiagnosed double pneumonia and in a state of catatonia and delirium, and restored my ability to ambulate. Dr. Marina Petrova, the deputy director, and Dr. Michael, the head doctor of what was known as the Reanimatology Ward, were of particular and notable aid. Uliana Efros, nanny to my granddaughter, Elizabeth Scarlett, always had our backs and traveled with Mikhaila, Andrey, and me for eight months from Russia to Florida and Serbia, caring for Scarlett, including spending a month in quarantine. Thanks as well to Uli’s daughter Liza Romanova, who helped take care of Scarlett in Russia, so that my daughter and son-in-law could visit me in the hospital. Finally, on the Russian end, I would like to thank Mikhail Avdeev, who helped us extensively with provision of medication and translation of medical information—both on very short notice.
Later, in June 2020, I sought admission at the IM Clinic for Internal Medicine in Belgrade, an institution dedicated to benzodiazepine withdrawal, and fell directly under the competent and caring treatment provided by Dr. Igor Bolbukh and his staff. Dr. Bolbukh had flown to Russia previously to consult there while I was in a state of delirium, provided months of pro bono medical guidance, moved me to a more stable condition when I arrived in Serbia, and managed my care thereafter. The IM Clinic was founded by Dr. Nikolai Vorobiev, and his staff were very patient, without resentment—a difficult feat to manage in these days of COVID and the inevitable accompanying and sudden quarantines.
There are also those who profoundly deserve credit, recognition, and gratitude on the professional front. Thank you to my agents, Mollie Glick of Creative Artists Agency, as well as Sally Harding of CookeMcDermid (Canada) and her colleagues Suzanne Brandreth and Hana El Niwairi of Cooke Agency International Canada.
Thank you to the editors and publishers of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: Penguin Random House Canada senior editor Craig Pyette, who played a diligent and instrumental role in quality control and enhancement; former CEO Brad Martin; current CEO Kristin Cochrane; publisher of the Knopf Random House Canada Publishing Group Anne Collins; vice president, associate publisher, and director of marketing strategy Scott Sellers; Penguin Random House UK editor Laura Stickney and her colleague Penelope Vogler, and CEO Tom Weldon; and Penguin Random House International CEO Markus Dohle. Thanks to the editors and publishers of the current book, a group that includes the immediately aforementioned individuals, as well as additional Penguin Random House US personnel, including publisher of the Portfolio and Sentinel imprints Adrian Zackheim and editor Helen Healey. Finally, thank you to Professor Bruce Pardy and lawyer Jared Brown for their active support of my ideas during a time when doing so could be truly hazardous to one’s professional reputation and security.
The worldwide tour of 160 cities that Tammy and I undertook during the incubation period of this book as well as its preliminary formulation was organized with exceptional efficiency and good nature by Creative Artists Agency representatives Justin Edbrooke (assisted by Daniel Smith) and Ari Levin (assisted by Colette Silver), as well as Live Nation’s Andrew Levitt. The Australian and New Zealand tour benefited from the attention of Australian producer TEG Dainty’s Brad Drummond, tour manager Simon Christian, and security man Scott Nicholson. Gunnlaugur Jónsson and his crew were exceptionally hospitable to Tammy and me (as well as to my mother and aunt, who accompanied us for the days we were in Iceland). John O’Connell served as primary tour manager, and was extremely professional, great at problem solving, and consistently upbeat and supportive over the months of travel and organization.
Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report traveled with us, introduced my lectures, and emceed the question-and-answer periods that followed, adding a necessary bit of levity to what might otherwise have been a too-serious endeavor. Rob Greenwald of Rogers & Cowan helped ensure appropriate media coverage. Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Douglas Murray, Gad Saad, and Steven Crowder extended their friendship and shared their extensive media presence. Zachary Lahn was there many times as needed, and Jeff Sandefer opened up his extensive connection network. Bill Vardy, Dennis Thigpen, Duncan Maisels, and Melanie Paquette served as drivers for the tour leg in North America when we used motor homes. Tammy and I would also like to thank designer Shelley Kirsch and the crew at SJOC Construction for completing the renovation of our house during these trying times with minimal supervision on our part. So much has happened in the last three years I am sure that I have missed key people, and for that I sincerely apologize.
Thanks is due, finally, to all of you who have read or listened to my books—Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, as well as the two 12 Rules volumes—and/or tuned in to my YouTube videos and podcasts.
I have been profoundly struck, as have the people close to me, by the exceptional loyalty and care you have demonstrated over the last half decade.
May all of you reading or listening to this book wend your way successfully through these difficult times. I hope you are surrounded by people you love and who love you in turn. I hope that you can rise to The Challenge presented by our current circumstances, and that we all might have the good fortune to eventually turn our attention to rebuilding The World after The Deluge.
