A Strange Phenomenon

Maybe nobody reading my blog has ever heard of David Foster Wallace. Don't feel bad--Before last night I never had either.

An American genius of literature, dead at 46.

The phenomenon I speak of is not David Foster Wallace himself. No, the phenomenon I'm referring to is what happens within me when someone like this dies. Why? To be perfectly honest I don't know. I was annoyed with myself that I didn't know him. Not that I hadn't read his works--That I had never even heard of him. I felt like I had cheated him somehow. I felt like I was ridiculously out-of-touch for not knowing who he was.

Last night when I got home I read Google News. There among all the usual chaos that makes up our news, there were all these stories--Stories of a true genius that lived right here in our time. I started reading news articles voraciously, one leading to another, and then another. I found myself searching Wikipedia and learning about him. Who was he really and what did he accomplish? I wanted to know it all. I even found myself before work this morning trying to watch a full-length interview of him when he appeared on Charlie Rose in 1997. I even found myself slightly irritated because I wanted to turn it up louder (I have bad hearing you know) but was respecting the possibility of my neighbor being home and hearing it. I wanted to keep watching it but had to go to work instead. I got home tonight and did a Google search once again, this time finding a link to a page on Harper's magazine where they had put all the writings that he had done for their magazine up for free in pdf form. Now I have to read that stuff too.

Isn't that so often the curse of a genius? They have so many thoughts racing through their brains that they truly are on the brink of madness most of their lives. Some go their whole lives and endure it and some don't. Some find fame in their chosen fields and some do not. I can't grasp what it would be like to be that way--To be able to hold multiple story lines in your mind at any given time. To be able to analyze and approach an idea from 10 different directions at the same time. I guess it's just as well I'm a simple man with simple thoughts.

I don't know who it was that caused me to feel this way the last time it happened to me, but I do know it's happened before. It's just weird...