The New York Times’s site has reposted a 2006 article about tennis star Roger Federer, not because of Federer’s resurgence at last month’s U.S. Open, but because the piece is by David Foster Wallace, the beloved and very funny writer who committed suicide last week after suffering depression most of his adult life.
You can read several megs of stuff about Wallace’s life and work by Googling his name: knock yourself out, as he’d say. What attracted my eye was the headline “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.”
Wallace often wrote about tennis (he was a junior champion in his home state of Illinois), not so much about religion, and whoever wrote the headline for the piece ramps up the religion angle more than the piece delivers. But at its most ethereal point, Wallace’s piece does make a point about what we can talk about and what we can’t. “There are three kinds of valid explanation for Federer’s ascendancy,” Wallace wrote. “One kind involves mystery and metaphysics and is, I think, closest to the real truth. The others are more technical and make for better journalism.”
This is a beautiful illustration of what made Wallace’s writing so interesting and funny but also sad. The truth, in his blithely scribbled formula, is contained in an untouchable realm that words can’t really pierce. But we go on talking anyway, discussing things in a way that wanders from reality, but has on its side precision and good form. It’s a deadly critique of our information-choked culture, offered, in Wallace’s typical style, with cheerful shrug.
It’s also a sharp sketch of what the church does in trying to approximate, in ritual, song and prayer, the mysteries and metaphysics of creation. For my money, then, the piece might as well be headlined, “Religious Experience as Roger Federer” as much as the other way around.
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posted September 18, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Love to me means caring sharing and holding (any others) around you as important if not more important than you. Reaching out to those who need caring is what we are told to do by Jesus but when you have a love for humanity it is something you want to do. Sharing the word of God is knowing that those around you even those who need care are loved by God just as you are. God doesn’t love anyone any more or less than the next person. We all have 24 hours in a day and we all have Gods love those 24 hours each day. We just need to see it and show it. Holding and lifting people in prayer is the best thing one can do for each other. Edifying each other and encouraging one another, servng one another is Love. And God would be smiling down knowing that each of us is doing just that.
posted September 18, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Mr. Wallace would be appalled to see that you are related his works to some sort of religious dogma. He was not a religious man in any sense of a “belief in god” he wasn’t talking about church or scripture.
He means to say love, caring reaching out are all innate within human beings part of our human experience in life. If any of you think your going to find jesus in his books, you are surely mistaken.
Has anyone even read any DFW? Or are you just using his name to proliferate religious doctrine? Maybe y’all should read a book that isn’t the bible.
posted September 18, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Actually Wallace was a regular church-goer, at least when he lived in Illinois. In an essay written for Rolling Stone soon after 9/11, he references “his church” several times. As for what his books and essays say about his belief in God, I’m not sure there are any ready answers to be found, for or against.
posted September 19, 2008 at 4:09 pm
In a tribute to Wallace by a former colleague, he mentioned that DFW’s favorite author was C.S. Lewis, and that he wished he could some day write something as good as “The Screwtape Letters.”