Much of what DFW believed about the world, about himself, about the nature of reality, ran counter to his own mental wellbeing and ultimately his own survival. Of the psychotherapies with proven efficacy, all seek to inculcate a mode of thinking in stark contrast to Wallace's.
In this piece and others, Wallace encourages a mindset that appears to me to actively induce alienation in the pursuit of deeper truth. I believe that to be deeply maladaptive. A large proportion of his words in this piece are spent describing that his instinctive reaction to the world around him is one of disgust and disdain.
Rather than seeking to transmute those feelings into more neutral or positive ones, he seeks to elevate himself above what he sees as his natural perspective. Rather than sit in his car and enjoy the coolness of his A/C or the feeling of the wheel against his skin or the patterns the sunlight makes on his dash, he abstracts, he retreats into his mind and an imagined world of possibilities. He describes engaging with other people, but it's inside his head, it's intellectualised and profoundly distant. Rather than seeing the person in the SUV in front as merely another human and seeking to accept them unconditionally, he seeks a fictionalised narrative that renders them palatable to him.
He may have had some sort of underlying chemical or structural problem that caused his depression, but we have no real evidence for that, we have no real evidence that such things exist. What we do know is that patterns of cognition that he advocated run contrary to the basic tenets of the treatment for depression with the best evidence base - CBT and it's variants.
Foster favoured a world view that was 'true' over one that made him happy. He saw happiness and contentment as essentially irrelevant compared to the pursuit of truth. I believe that to be his ultimate error.
I don't believe any of this is true. Read the middle essay in _Consider the Lobster_ about his engagement with his church in Normal, IL and hanging out with his neighbors watching the newscasts during 9/11. He's not a recluse withdrawn into his own head.
I think, based on the unfortunate tone you set with that first dumb comment, that you're drawing sophomoric extrapolations from a single essay that you are actually misreading.
I didn't say he was a recluse. I said that his way of dealing with the world was remote and intellectual, that he distanced himself from the world around him, that he habitually narrativised in preference to engaging. I believe that such a strategy, while indescribably useful for a writer, is a highly maladaptive strategy if you want to live happily in the world.
"The View from Mrs Thompson's" surely reinforces that argument. Several thousand words on his experience of one of the most shocking events in American history, but hardly one of them describes an actual emotion. It's practically an anthropological study. He lavishes endless verbiage to describe what kind of a place it is, what kind of people they are, but he doesn't even come close to writing about who they are, what they felt, what he felt, how they related to each other. From what he wrote, he may as well have witnessed it all through a one-way mirror.
Go, re-read it. Tell me that's a man who is living in the present. Tell me he isn't terrified of feeling something real.
In this piece and others, Wallace encourages a mindset that appears to me to actively induce alienation in the pursuit of deeper truth. I believe that to be deeply maladaptive. A large proportion of his words in this piece are spent describing that his instinctive reaction to the world around him is one of disgust and disdain.
Rather than seeking to transmute those feelings into more neutral or positive ones, he seeks to elevate himself above what he sees as his natural perspective. Rather than sit in his car and enjoy the coolness of his A/C or the feeling of the wheel against his skin or the patterns the sunlight makes on his dash, he abstracts, he retreats into his mind and an imagined world of possibilities. He describes engaging with other people, but it's inside his head, it's intellectualised and profoundly distant. Rather than seeing the person in the SUV in front as merely another human and seeking to accept them unconditionally, he seeks a fictionalised narrative that renders them palatable to him.
He may have had some sort of underlying chemical or structural problem that caused his depression, but we have no real evidence for that, we have no real evidence that such things exist. What we do know is that patterns of cognition that he advocated run contrary to the basic tenets of the treatment for depression with the best evidence base - CBT and it's variants.
Foster favoured a world view that was 'true' over one that made him happy. He saw happiness and contentment as essentially irrelevant compared to the pursuit of truth. I believe that to be his ultimate error.