Octet David Foster Wallace Pdf Online
Consider the octet: eight people in a room. A support group for people who have been asked to review a manuscript of a support-group story. The story within the story is about a support group for people who can’t stop imagining the inner lives of strangers. The leader of that group, let’s call her Beth, says: “You’re on a bus. The woman across the aisle is crying. You don’t know why. But you construct a tragedy for her — dead child, fired, cancer — and you feel a small, clean grief. That grief is not compassion. It is a way of not having to look at her face.”
Turn your paper over. Sit in the silence for thirty seconds. Do not fill the silence with a device. The silence is the real PDF. The silence is the only thing no one can sell you.
The octet says: there is no difference between those answers. octet david foster wallace pdf
One of the members of this group (the outer frame) raises a hand and says: “Is this supposed to be about me? Because I feel accused.” The facilitator — a man with a beard that seems designed to communicate sensitivity — says: “That’s the mechanism. Accusation is the first layer of honesty. The second layer is: so what?”
Why did you keep reading? Be honest. Was it the form? The voice? The low-grade dread of being seen? Or was it simpler: because the screen was bright and the room was quiet and the alternative was just sitting here, with nothing between you and the sound of your own pulse? Consider the octet: eight people in a room
True or false: You have, at some point in the last week, performed happiness for an audience of one — a spouse, a parent, a cashier, a pet. You have smiled the smile that costs calories. You have said “fine” when fine was a lie so large it had its own gravitational field.
Listen. The octet has a secret: there is no octet. There are only you and the page and the queasy recognition that you’ve been reading a piece about a piece about a support group about the impossibility of truly sharing a self. The bearded facilitator was never bearded. Louise never whispered. The pop quiz is a mirror with small print at the bottom: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. The leader of that group, let’s call her
Now: does performing happiness make the happiness less real? Or does it make the performance the only real thing? David Foster Wallace somewhere (not here, not in this fictional octet, but somewhere) wrote that the really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline. But he also wrote about a woman who couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she was thinking. Which is this sentence’s trap door: you are now thinking about thinking about performing happiness. The octet applauds. The applause is lonely.
