David Foster Wallace has FUCKING KILLED HIMSELF.

Horrible. It's been a long time since anything shocked me like this.

Additional thoughts: I feel just endlessly shaken by this. Of course, a large part of it's selfish: Wallace should have had many more years to produce many more signs and wonders. Was Infinite Jest in some ways flawed? Who cares? He wrote it in his thirties. Plenty of time to write something like it but better, or something completely different but better or something unimaginably awesome that would shake American literature to its foundations. Did he have it in him? Maybe, maybe not, but it would have been great to watch him try. And now, never no never no more. It's very painful to contemplate.

Infinite Jest is absolutely jam-packed with addition, depression, psychoses, and all sorts of mental fucked-uppedness; Wallace was clearly a very acute as well as compassionate observer of such things, which, one might have thought, would have transferred into an awareness of and ability to handle his own mental state. I guess depression is something that it's difficult or impossible to deal with analytically, but man alive, if Wallace couldn't do it, then what hope for any of us?