Farewell, David Foster Wallace

I am still trying to collect the ways that David Foster Wallace has changed my perspective on life and the way I approach my storytelling.  As he has been a rather recent discovery, I can't do justice, but all I know is that I can't remember a time that a figure whom I didn't know died that has left me so profoundly sad and unsettled.  He apparently hanged himself in his home.

The first writing of his I read was his May 21, 2005 Kenyon Commencement address.  I recently read his short story collection, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and have been poking through his last published book, Oblivion, and his essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, since I received them through the mail last week.  It feels as though a conversation with someone stopped abruptly, like there was a pause mid-sentence and then he was dead.  But at least I can continue to read.  

In the short spurts of time I've had in front of the computer today, I've written a couple thousand words in an attempt at gratitude for his work, what it has meant to me, the understanding it has brought to me.  But thus far, it is jumbled, bloated and ineloquent.  Perhaps it is enough for now to say that I am sad, but it seems wrong to say when there are family and loved ones of his who no doubt feel a much greater loss.

An excerpt from the above commencement speech:

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually 

expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental 

that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot 

themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth 

is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull 

the trigger.  

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal 

arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through 

your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, 

a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely,

 completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like 

hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that 

you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" 

really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American 

life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part 

involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older 

folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

The minor fall and the major lift

It's amazing what a song can do.  Music can accentuate joy, provide solace, express things which we are not able to do ourselves at the time.  Great art can provide empathy as well or better than any person, even the person who created it, is possible to give.  The great Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is a very well-documented example of this.  It is perhaps one of the most covered songs of the past twenty years, probably because of the way it moved the artists who later decided to give their own version a try.  Jeff Buckley has the definitive version, his angelic voice reigns over the religious/sexual themed lyrics as though he and the song were paired by fate.

I have loved this song for years now, but its cathartic nature became very real to me recently when the only thing I could do to get out of the way I was feeling was play this over and over on my housemate's nylon-stringed guitar that has to be retuned every five minutes.  It came out as a prayer and a plea and left me feeling more in touch with the nature of existence like nothing else at the time could do.  

Below are some of my favorite versions I've come across.  Along with Cohen and Buckley is a great one from David Bazan aka Pedro the Lion, a ukelele version from Zach Condon of Beirut, Regina Spektor accompanied by a cello and John Cale's great, emotive performance with his piano.  There's also a live Buckley version, which is different, longer, and of course, beautiful.

Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah

Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah

David Bazan - Hallelujah

Beirut - Hallelujah

Regina Spektor - Hallelujah

John Cale - Hallelujah

Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah (live)