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On Friday night, David Foster Wallace, a man whose words have done more than just about anyone on the planet to confront me, comfort me, console me, break me down, build me up, and create the person who is now known as Bryan Woods decided to kill himself.

I wanted to write some thoughts on all of this sooner, but decided to take some time to collect my thoughts.  Luckily, the journalism surrounding the event has taken a turn from its unbelievably embarrassing beginnings to heartfelt and thoughtful writings.

And since many writers who are far smarter and more talented than I could ever hope to be are starting to do a great job celebrating Wallace’s work and eulogizing his life, I’d like to quickly address the issue looming in the back of every fanatical Wallace reader’s mind that is only now sneaking to the surface.

David Foster Wallace was a writer who just had a way of guiding you through the most complex, frustrating, discouraging, and nauseatingly normal problems we face as people living in our culture. We knew he was way smarter than us, but like our favorite uncle, parent, grandfather, whatever…he never talked down to us.

He’d address the issue, explain to us in words we could understand the layers of intricacies that were the actual foundations of the angst, disillusionment, anger, or sadness we were feeling, laugh with us, and then  guide us to cope.

And that last part is what’s so significant.  Unlike the grunge musicians and lesser writers (Cobain, Plath) Wallace is already being unfortunately compared to, he was never a writer to express anger for the sake of anger. He was never volatile, off-the-cuff, or whiny. He was calm; focused. He was the wise voice of reason that could make your mind careen and your throat close up with despair and then explain why it was all worth it.

It depends on the story.  Often the theme was compassion.  Sometimes it was even politics. It was never irony or entertainment or drugs or self-obsession like the pop culture idols other journalists are trying so hard to compare him to.

In “Good Old Neon,” Wallace refuses to talk us out of suicide. In fact, he walks us through the most crystal clear and beautiful rationalization of suicide I’ve personally ever read.  But in the end, even through the frustrations of language, and even knowing that sharing your biggest thoughts of love and compassion for another human being through “the tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors,” choosing to live instead is worth it.  Why? Because “It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through a tiny hole.”

My point is this.  David Foster Wallace had an unparalleled ability to guide you through the darkest demons brought on by any number of factors at play in that claustrophobic “1×1 box of bone” that is your mind, but he always showed the silver lining.  Not one of those cheesy, stupid, unbelievable when you’re inconsolable kinds of linings, but the one that is just enough, just honest enough, and just possibly true enough that reading Wallace was to discover a new appreciation for other human beings, love, compassion.

My point is that when a man you have looked up to for so long as the insight for the Big Answers decides to demap himself, your brain gets fucked up a little tiny bit.  After all, this is the man you’ve shown your vulnerabilities to and who has in turn repaid you. Imagine if your high school guidance counselor had responded to your cryptic hate poetry by blowing his brains out all over his office, in other words.

The feeling will pass, inevitably, as we Wallace fans realize that this man was simply a brilliant writer with a genius flare for words and prose who cared deeply about us as readers and who was able to provide a deeper give-and-take between He and Us than we’ve possibly ever felt before in literature.  And while that’s a great feat, we still know what it feels like to break down and cry in front of others.  And we will still be driven crazy by women like Madame Psychosis, and we will still meet people worse off than ourselves, will still find ourselves occassionally frustrated by loneliness, and so on, and so on.

And our hero will still be there in those words.  The smoking-and-chewing bandanna’d man who at some point married a woman we’ve never heard of who taught at some college we’ve never been to and saw something in tennis we could never quite figure out is gone, and the confusion will ultimately pass.

And we’ll be glad that we got the insight just when we felt we needed it, the metafeelings will subside, and we’ll get back to normal.  But or the time being, we’re only human.

Find more articles about all of this at The Howling Fantods