There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.
David Foster WallaceI felt despair. The wordโs overused and banalified now, despair, but itโs a serious word, and Iโm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture โ a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. Itโs maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But itโs not these things, quite. Itโs more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that Iโm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. Itโs wanting to jump overboard.
David Foster WallaceBut if I decide to decide thereโs a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, wonโt the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?
David Foster WallaceUnder fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.
David Foster WallaceThe Sophists had this idea: Forget this idea of what's true or notโwhat you want to do is rhetoric; you want to be able to persuade the audience and have the audience think you're smart and cool. And Socrates and Plato, basically their whole idea is, "Bullshit. There is such a thing as truth, and it's not all just how to say what you say so that you get a good job or get laid, or whatever it is people think they want.
David Foster WallaceDostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human beingโthat is, how to be an actual *person*, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.
David Foster Wallace