Unintentional Motivation

As some of you may know David Foster Wallace committed suicide recently. Wallace was the author or “Infinite Jest,” a highly acclaimed novel and considered a bright star of the current literary generation. A very sad passing.

I read or I tried to read “Infinite Jest” several times. The novel is War and Peace in it’s length and so when I say I only managed to get through about 250 pages each time you can see I only had begun reading it. But I just couldn’t do it.  I could see that the prose was well crafted and the many themes were woven carefully through the story. But it did nothing for me. It was like reading literary oatmeal, I knew it was good for me but I couldn’t find the flavor to keep me going.

Fortunately, my conclusion was not that it was not any good. My conclusion was more like I had lost my taste for it. Kind of like when I have yogurt for breakfast everyday for too long and finally really don’t want to have yogurt again for a very long time.

In analytical hindsight I suspect that my thought process, consciously and subconsciously, went a little something like this. I have obviously lost my taste for “serious” literature” and the disaffection comes perhaps from a knowledge that I wanted to stop reading about people living and doing and actually start living and doing myself. So Wallace in writing a book that bored me to death actually brought me to life. I guess I owe that debt to him and am sorry that he had to pass for me to grasp that.

It reminds me of the final meeting that drove me out of the corporate world. A Project manager, we’ll call her Sarah, held this interdepartmental meeting to try to help improve communication and cooperation between the departments. Despite some passionate and conflicting view points it was oddly a very enlightening meeting that did help the departments understand where each was coming from.  Everybody thought the meeting went well.

The meeting was critically successful but at the same time it was terrible and crushing. I had just spent all this energy on something that I hated. I went back to my desk called someone to meet them for happy hour and left. And though I had not technically quit when I left that day, I was done. This awful meeting had given me the inertia to break free.

To end with a literary reference, these two events are like the intentional fallacy: the successes or motivations I took from them were probably not what the authors intended, and in fact once the works are placed in the public domain, the authors lose all control of whatever intent they may have hoped for.

And so thank goodness for failed intentions.

This entry was posted on 16. September 2008 at 10:21 and is filed under Permusations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.