I came home from a three-day camping trip on Sunday and soon learned of the terrible news that my favorite author, David foster Wallace, had committed suicide.

I first started reading DFW's work in the mid-nineties. It was odd, bizarre even, how his writing resonated with me. Sitting there, I felt as though he had unscrewed the top of my skull and connected electrodes to my brain to channel his words directly into my head. Knowing that this voice has been silenced forever, my emotions over the past couple of days have run the entire circuit with pit-stops at shock, sorrow, anger, confusion, and regret. The regret is because I never took that extra step of reaching out to him, even just to send a postcard of thanks telling him how much his work meant to me.

I don't even want to speculate on the demons that drove Wallace to his desperate end. Mostly, my heart goes out to his wife, his parents and sister, and all those who were close to him. I can scarcely imagine their loss and wish for them a solace that I know is not likely to come soon.

For the rest of us, there has been an explosion of memorials, remembrances, and tributes to David Foster Wallace. The Howling Fantods site has been compiling a list of them. The ones that I have appreciated most are those written by people who actually had some, no matter how fleeting, personal contact with Wallace. It's confirmation that the actual man was kind and thoughtful and generous, exceeding even my lofty fanboy expectations:
Kathleen Fitzpatrick

McSweeney's has devoted the front page of its website to remembrances of DFW for the “forseeable future”. Here is Zadie Smith's contribution:

He was my favourite. I didn't feel he had an equal amongst living writers. We corresponded and met a few times but I stuttered and my hands shook. The books meant too much to me: I was just another howling fantod. In person, he had a great purity. I had a sense of shame in his presence, though he was meticulous about putting people at their ease. It was the exact same purity one finds in the books: If we must say something, let's at least only say true things.¹ The principle of his fiction, as I understand it. It's what made his books so beautiful to me, and so essential. The only exception was the math one, which I was too stupid to understand. One day, soon after it was published, David phoned up, sincerely apologetic, and said: "No, look ... you don't need anything more than high school math, that's all I really have." He was very funny. He was an actual genius, which is as rare in literature as being kind—and he was that, too. He was my favourite, my literary hero, I loved him and I'll always miss him.

1 - And let's say them grammatically.

If you're unfamiliar with Wallace's writing, the pieces he's written for Harper's would be a good place to start. Also: this Kenyon College commencement address provides a blueprint for living in the world today honestly and generously without compromise:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

And so I'm mostly past all those other emotions at this point and am currently at gratitude: gratitude that a man such as David Foster Wallace lived and breathed and left behind a body of work that was able, somehow, through all the background noise, to touch the lives of others in such a positive way. Also, hope: hope that those he touched will continue to find meaning and goodness in his work and that they, we, all of us, might have the courage to further his legacy.