“forever wincing, reconsidering”
From the same John Jeremiah Sullivan essay I reblogged last night:
It’s this quality, of being inwardly divided, that risks getting flattened and written out of (David Foster) Wallace’s story by his postmortem idolization, which would make of him a dispenser of wisdom. We should guard against that. We’ll lose the most essential Wallace, the one that is forever wincing, reconsidering, wishing he hadn’t said whatever he just said. Those were moments when his voice was most authentically of our time, and they are the reason people will one day be able to read him and feel what it was like to be alive now.
