I’m not sure what it is about some people that makes them have to go out like that, way before we’re ready for them to be gone. I won’t try and be intrusive by wondering what specifically upset the balance to that point. A simple Google search will tell you he had devoted fans around the world. I have met others, like myself, who read Infinite Jest and were changed by the experience. I mean, something on a cellular level was changed. You were one being before reading it, and another afterward.
It’s a book you want to preach about, like Stranger in a Strange Land, or Confederacy of Dunces, or The Illuminatus Trilogy. But when asked what it’s about, what could you tell them? Drugs, rehab, tennis, cinema, addiction as a pop culture artifact, strategy, the rise and fall, fuck, it’s about everything. But it’s not a book you can push on someone and expect them to get it. It has to find them at the right point in their lives, I guess, and it did for me. The book was in my house for years before I happened upon it, I found it in the basement bookshelf, it belonged to my wife, who bought it when it was current.
The title of this post comes from the book. To eliminate one’s own map is to commit suicide. Whether your “map” is your face, the animation thereof, or your consciousness itself is for you, the reader, to decide.
I will pretend to nurture hope in the possibility that every time one of these one-of-a-kind creators of art leaves us, that somewhere, in an unsuspecting regular home, another one might have been born. It’s no more false (or falser, if you approve my wife’s choice of Scrabble words last week) than any other quasi-religious huckster’s worldview. Realistically, it just fits in with everything else in the world that promotes despair.
It’s in the dictionary!