Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,77

native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. The internal head-speed or whatever of these ideas, memories, realizations, emotions and so on is even faster, by the way—exponentially faster, unimaginably faster—when you’re dying, meaning during that vanishingly tiny nanosecond between when you technically die and when the next thing happens, so that in reality the cliché about people’s whole life flashing before their eyes as they’re dying isn’t all that far off—although the whole life here isn’t really a sequential thing where first you’re born and then you’re in the crib and then you’re up at the plate in Legion ball, etc., which it turns out that that’s what people usually mean when they say ‘my whole life,’ meaning a discrete, chronological series of moments that they add up and call their lifetime. It’s not really like that. The best way I can think of to try to say it is that it all happens at once, but that at once doesn’t really mean a finite moment of sequential time the way we think of time while we’re alive, plus that what turns out to be the meaning of the term my life isn’t even close to what we think we’re talking about when we say ‘my life.’ Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on at the most basic level. And yet at the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else, which is yet another paradox. Dr. Gustafson—whom I would meet again later and find out that he had almost nothing to do with the big doughy repressed guy sitting back against his chair’s beads in his River Forest office with colon cancer in him already at that time and him knowing nothing yet except that he didn’t feel quite right down there in the bathroom lately and if it kept on he’d make an appointment to go in and ask his internist about it—Dr. G. would later say that the whole my whole life flashed before me phenomenon at the end is more like being a whitecap on the surface of the ocean, meaning that it’s only at the moment you subside and start sliding back in that you’re really even aware there’s an ocean at all. When you’re up and out there as a whitecap you might talk and act as if you know you’re just a whitecap on the ocean, but deep down you don’t think there’s really an ocean at all. It’s almost impossible to. Or like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of, etc. There are all sorts of ways to try to express it.

And of course all this time you’ve probably been noticing what seems like the really central, overarching paradox, which is that this whole thing where I’m saying words can’t really do it and time doesn’t really go in a straight line is something that you’re hearing as words that you have to start listening to the first word and then each successive word after that in chronological time to understand, so if I’m saying that words and sequential time have nothing to do with it you’re wondering why we’re sitting here in this car using words and taking up your increasingly precious time, meaning aren’t I sort of logically contradicting myself right at the start. Not to mention am I maybe full of B.S. about knowing what happens—if I really did kill myself, how can you even be hearing this? Meaning am I a fraud. That’s OK, it doesn’t really matter what you think. I mean it probably matters to you, or you think it does—that isn’t what I meant by doesn’t matter. What I mean is that it doesn’t really matter what you think about me, because despite appearances this isn’t even really about me. All I’m trying to do is sketch out one little part of what it was like before I died and why I at least