What David Foster Wallace Taught Me About Harvard

Why are Harvard students so cynical? A cursory glance at Sidechat, riddled with final club tier lists and post-exam professor hit pieces, returns us to a hopelessly unproductive cycle: We put little effort into something, complain about it, receive validation for our complaints, and gradually drain ourselves of motivation. Faced with minor inconvenience after minor inconvenience, we cede control to a victim mentality that drains our intellectual strength.

Yes, there’s always something to kvetch about. But what’s the opportunity cost of going about our days rummaging for matters to moan about, taking umbrage at any supposed injustice? Complaining about everything makes us feel terrible; as a student body, we’re practically wedded to anxiety. I doubt anyone finds joy in plunging into a dumpster of self-sabotaging filth.

Yet we do. Like any addiction, anxiety requires immense effort to recover from. There’s a delicate balance between reasoned critique and cynical venting, which is only cathartic in moderation. When I’m anxious, nothing feels better than talking out my insecurities until my visceral, pent-up gripes have been validated. Thankfully, I don’t have to look any further than America’s greatest therapist: David Foster Wallace, novelist and essayist extraordinaire.

A few months before arriving at Harvard, I read “Infinite Jest,” a panoramic tome about tennis and Quebecois politics. I thought I’d be diving into a clever work of postmodern fiction; I sought an extension to the Vonnegut and Pynchon I devoured for their mindbending metafiction. But no. Pretty soon, as I made my way through the novel, I knew something was different.

As a central feature of the movement, postmodernists ostentatiously subvert literary conventions when developing structure or plot. While such motives may reflect life’s precarity (yadda yadda yadda), they signal an authorial cop-out as each rhetorical trick-shot scampers away from repressed realities. Wallace, pioneer of the movement critics have dubbed the “New Sincerity,” doesn’t shy away from the insecurities we pretend to ignore. He massages those knots and lets you know he’s doing so. While absorbing his prose, you feel articulated.

Much of Wallace’s body of work discusses the tension between distracting oneself from reality or facing it head-on. “Infinite Jest” bears countless similarities to the Harvard experience, not least of which is the fact that it’s consistently maligned for being performative and pretentious. It’s at once remarkably fantastical and deeply relatable.

In parallel storylines, its two main characters, tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza and recovering addict Don Gately, attempt to manage weighty expectations without compromising their fundamental senses of self. To retain their individualism, they have no choice but to give themselves away to a greater cause — an action we would all do well to emulate.

It’s tempting to sit around complaining about unbearable indignities, but life is deeper. I don’t know what the meaning of life is, but I can guarantee that spending all your time complaining about Amanda Claybaugh amounts to a wasted existence.

It’s safe to say that most Harvard minds are a cage match for distractions both interpersonal and existential, a theatre for startups, hookups, and screwups to play on repeat. Indeed, as the daily grind turns sullen grimaces to Sidechat-logo tears, it’s imperative to remember that frantic intellect brought us into this mess. Sheer cleverness can’t outwit a problem this broad; like any addiction, the only cure is full withdrawal and incremental acceptance.

Wallace is one of us: a perspicacious product of American higher education. Wallace is our up-and-comer striving to walk the tightrope between cerebral intellectualism and the ‘real’ America which encroaches his bubble. And indeed, for half a semester in the fall of 1989, Wallace was our fellow neurotic Harvardian who earnestly tried to master his mindset amid an anxious man’s world.

So shut up, take a deep breath, and embrace the complexity around you. It’s here to stay.

Cyrus P. Sarfaty ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Adams House.