Infinite Jest

442 - 449 (undated)

These pages were so evocative, twisting the internals, vibrating my innards, like a blender chopping vegetables into a smooth homogeneous mixture, such that I can’t tell my organs apart anymore. 

I think Don Gately’s life story here- the abusive parts, the mother suffering from alcohol, the self-beating as if you were on fire, the alcohol with vegetables in it – it is all just so heartbreaking. I wonder - is this like Jacob Riis and “How the Other Half Lives?” or is this exposing an underlying oneness and connectedness of human experience, a oneness and connectedness that appears in creased smiles and slightly outgrown fingernails? A oneness that Spinoza defines as a “god” – the Spinozist god who is everywhere, the god that Gately, having grown up w/o a concept of god, has trouble conceptualizing or understanding, but he keeps worshipping it anyway, he doesn't know what it is or who it is or whether or not it exists, but chooses to buy the myth and hit his knees to the floor because it keeps him safe from the substance? 

The alcoholic mother enduring this kind of repetitive fading, on a nightly basis, the perfectly inelastic demand consumer subject, a dependency upon a substance like it is the third leg that you lean on. It goes straight up your anal cavity and rubs against your spinal cord. And when it disappears, you have to find a new crutch, some new daily ritual, some new repetitive act to keep away the spider web and its cobs, another type of action that forms the structure and routine of time. 

The memories, bubbling up on a nightly basis. Gately in bed at night, feeling as if he's inside of a pool or sea that is characterized by a water with terrific depths, that is silent and dim and the same temperature as himself. 

The memories bubbling up in sobriety, seeing your mother beat herself up on a nightly basis, just moments after she herself had been beaten up, broken, punched in the stomach, repetitively, in that empty space where I think I feel my organs dissolve into some homogeneous mixture. I’ll never, I think, see my own organs, even as they exist inside me every single day. 

---

579 - 583

579: I saw a video online today of a man with a dislocated left knee and he just decided to walk to the telephone pole in front of his house with a rope of some kind, moving in some way that looks like it could only occur in a cartoon, and he sits down on the grass in front of the telephone pole, wraps one end of the rope around his leg and throws the other end around the pole. He presses his right foot against the telephone pole, pulls on the rope, and pops his left knee back into place. How he does it and how it felt, I don’t know – the video edited that part out. But I can’t get the image of him walking out of my head, his left knee bending out at the same angle as a fuel gauge arrow pointing to “E”.

I was reminded of that video while reading pg. 579, where we get a description of Bruce Green’s dad’s hobble. 

“Depressed Residential” as a housing architecture genre – lol

People who can still use “party” as a verb

583 – description of how waste becomes part of the composition of the street reminds me of how whenever I was a kid, there was a crushed and flattened Sprite can that would sort of detach and reattach to different cars’ tires in my neighborhood, like a remora. It was on my friend's dad’s car for a bit of time before transferring over to my dad’s car – in a way, tracking it and seeing where it went was a sort of game, this crushed Sprite can turning into an acquaintance we’d say hello to whenever we saw it, lending it a respectful downward head nod.

---

Pg 1039: 

“My desire for approval – living for the applause of hands you don’t know”

“Threshold problems” to describe ocd and the desire to get past a certain “threshold”, where it is finally “enough”, where things are at last “complete”.

09.18.2026

Pgs. 565 - 567:

Orin and Helen’s hookup 

(1) “This incredible specimen had – unbidden, unStrategized – come up to him and started a lush foreign-accented conversation and revealed professionally lovely hands”

(2) “As if the universe were reaching out a hand to pluck him from the rim of the abyss of despair that any real sort of rejection or frustration of his need for some Subject he’d picked out always threatened him with," 

(3) "The universe were sending this lovely steadying left hand to pull him gently back and embrace him and not so much console him as remind him of who and what he was about"

(4) "It is not about consolation. They start the thing with each other's buttons. It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about glands or instincts or the split-second shiver and clench of leaving yourself; nor about love or about whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never love, which kills what needs it. It feels to the punter rather to be about hope, an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject's fluttering face, a something the same that will propitiate hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to be assured that for a moment he has her, now has won her as if from someone or something else, something other than he, but that he has her and is what she sees and all she sees, that it is not conquest but surrender, that he is both offense and defense and she neither, nothing but this one second's love of her, of-her, spinning as it arcs his way, not his but her love, that he has it, this love (his shirt off now, in the mirror), that for one second she loves him too much to stand it, that she must (she feels) have him, must take him inside or else dissolve into worse than nothing; that all else is gone: that her sense of humor is gone, her petty griefs, triumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the deaths of pets — that there is now inside her a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O., O. That he is the One."

(5) "(This is why, maybe, one Subject is never enough, why hand after hand must descend to pull him back from the endless fall. For were there for him just one, now, special and only, the One would be not he or she but what was between them, the obliterating trinity of You and I into We. Orin felt that once and has never recovered, and will never again.)." 

(6) "And about contempt, it is about a kind of hatred, too, along with the hope and need. Because he needs them, needs her, because he needs her he fears her and so hates her a little, hates all of them, a hatred that comes out disguised as a contempt he disguises in the tender attention with which he does the thing with her buttons, touches the blouse as if it too were part of her, and him…"

Love as "killing what it needs" and "the obliterating trinity of You and I into We". Relates to Hegelian reading of love as true union -- feeling a unified pulse with the other, and, by "killing what it needs", I think DFW is referring to the self, the ego -- love cancels, preserves, and uplifts the ego into a higher "we", a unity of negations. 

From Hegel's fragment on Love

(7) Hence each individual loses more and more of his worth, his pretensions, and his independence. This must happen, because his worth was his share in dominion [over objects]; for a man without the pride of being the center of things the end his collective whole is supreme, and being, like all other individuals, so small a part of that, he despises himself.

(8) Love is indignant if part of the individual is severed and held back as a private property.

The concept of shame in Hegel's fragment probably relates to how Orin seeks to possess Helen. In (4), he "has her, has won her as if from someone or something else"; this kind of Gollum-like desire to own the Other rather than recognize it as a separate self-consciousness. And, in (5), the "obliterating trinity of You and I into We" as being something "Orin felt... and has never recovered, and never will again" -- perhaps because, through Hegel, love required the cancellation, preservation, and uplift of the self with the other into a higher unity, and to reduce the Other into an object and thus be unable to recognize the self makes love impossible.