There was this greedy rotten King in ancient times.

He killed and sinned and kil

led again. He laughed at the Gods until he needed their help. He asked them how
to kill his rival, and because he was a sinner the gods plotted against him. The
y had Thanatos, the god of death, chain him up at the bottom of the underworld.
But he tricked Thanatos into showing him how the chains worked. Then he locked u
p the god of death. This man literally cheated death. And so he had to be punish
ed. The gods sentenced him to an eternity of drudgery. He was forced to roll a b
ig heavy rock up a steep hill, and the fates arranged that every time he reached
the summit, the rock would roll right back down. He would spend all of time swe
ating and cursing as he pushed the rock up the hill, knowing that once he got up
there, to the peak, the rock would just roll back to the bottom. Up, down. Fore
ver. That king guy was called Sisyphus and his story is, somewhat depressingly,
also forever our story. Well, except that we re not all kings, and only some of us
are sinners.
When David Foster Wallace gave his now insanely famous commencement address to t
he Kenyon College graduating class of 2005, he tried to tell these young citizen
s what to expect from adult life. He talked about getting cut off in traffic, an
d standing for an interminable amount of time in a grocery store checkout line.
He talked about the weird social scripts we have, like when a cashier says how ar
e you even though they don t care. These sorts of day-in, day-out social transactio
ns and negotiations. The kind that are frequently underscored by Muzak. He posit
ed, in this speech, that this kind of bullshit was the basis of adult life.
At the start of that talk Wallace told a story. It goes something like this: The
re are two young guy fishes swimming along doing young guy fish things, talking
about, like, homework or fish sports, or something. Then this wizened old grandp
a fish swims by and says to the young fish, Good morning! How s the water, today fe
llas? and they say Good, and after Grandpa swims away one of the young guy fishes t
urns to the other and says, What the fuck is water?
Wallace used this jokey parable much earlier than that, though. It shows up in t
he middle of his biggest book, Infinite Jest. In the book this one sober biker g
uy, whose name is BOB DEATH, if you can believe it, tells it to one of the main
characters, Donald Gately. They ve just come out of an AA meeting called Tough Shit
But You Still Can t Drink. And Bob Death tells this jokey parable to Don because D
on just gave, at the meeting, a big speech about praying for recovery even thoug
h he doesn t believe in God. About keeping a faithless faith. About routinized bel
ief.
So in Infinite Jest the thing about the fishes is about more than bullshit, or a
t least bigger bullshit, though it s still about day-in and day-out routines, abou
t being alert and trying to actually see the world.
Okay, let s do a little plot recap before we really get into it: so the book is ba
sically about these two institutions in some alternate near-future Boston. The i
nstitutions are a halfway house where addicts try and fight their demons and a p
rivate tennis academy for teenagers. Well, it s more about the nearly parallel liv
es led by the characters in these two settings, and capitalism, and paralysis, a
nd terrorism, and anxiety and a lot of other stuff too. It s a big and messy sort
of book.
Donald Gately works at the halfway house. He is living his second life, and in a
very specific kind of way Wallace has him cheating death. At one point he was a
Demerol addict, and he did a lot of bad guy things to feed his addiction. He bu
rgled, fought, and even killed so that he could keep getting fucked up on Demora
l. His daily routine at one point consisted of breaking into places, pawning th
ings, getting swindled, acting as a bruiser for his dealer, and then sitting sti
ll for as long as he could, for as long the high would last, sometimes covered i
n his own blood.

Because of the networked and semi-fractal structure of Infinite Jest, we see Gat
ely and the other characters across many moments. In another moment, his routine
is cleaning toilets, making lunch and dinner for the residents for the halfway
house, attending AA meeting after AA meeting, and getting down on his knees nigh
t after night to pray, to ask for strength from a nebulous entity that lives for
him mostly in doubt.
In Infinite Jest, as out here in the real world, AA is a program intended to sup
port addicts and enable them to live clean. It relies, rather famously, on twelv
e steps. There are also supplementary cliches that inform the way a person lives
out the program. Platitudes like one day at a time and let go and let God. The first
three steps, and all of the clichs, require that you commit yourself to a practic
e of blind faith, that you see that your life has become unmanageable, that you
believe in some higher power, and that you hand your life over to that power. So
Don does his best with these things, because otherwise he d die on Demerol. Other
wise he d die caught up in the compulsive spiral of addiction. Like I said, these
rituals enable him to cheat that fate, death, and live a second life.
But that life becomes, like Sisyphus s, about paying the price for cheating death.
And he engages the rolling of that rock up the hill, the meetings, the praying,
the toilet scrubbing, the day-in day-out one day at a time stuff because it s bet
ter than being an addict, because this second life, however tedious and rote, is
one he got to choose. It s how he was able to liberate himself from his compulsio
n, and to give shape and significance to whatever remains of his time on earth.
For Gately, then, these routines are more than that: they are rituals. They are
what enable him to experience freedom, and to therefore live a meaningful life.
The difference between ritual and routine lies here, I think. For Gately even th
e ordinary tedium and repetitive aspects of his life add up to more. Because he
knows that the daily routines of his life are the price he s paying for his freedo
m, he also lives with the knowledge, to crib another clich from AA, that even his
worst sober day is better than his best day enslaved to his addiction. He knows
, then, even on his worst day in sobriety, that this is water.
Another main character, Hal Incandenza, is less sure. He is still sort of a youn
g guy fish, and Infinite Jest s opening scene details the harrowing prison of his
mind unaware of the world he lives in. He can t reach outside of himself and make
a connection, he s stuck, isolated and suspended, held in place by the chains of a
solipsism so total that it is not even aware of itself.
Throughout the novel, Gately and Hal live in peripheral and often parallel assoc
iation. Hal attends the prestigious tennis academy, which was founded by his fam
ous filmmaker father. The halfway house is down the hill from the school, and on
e of its more interesting residents was very nearly Hal s sister in law, and his f
ather s favorite muse. There are other connections and parallels too, but there s no
need to namecheck them all right now. Besides, it would take too long.
The function of the tennis academy is to train top-tier athletes, though the sch
ool is also rigorously academic. It is in the business of creating massive overa
chievers. The activities of the student body are strictly regimented, and the re
petitive practices and tennis drills are designed to instill a rote behaviour of
excellence.
For Hal and his peers, success is literally a matter of muscle memory. The aim i
s to practice until perfection becomes second nature. They are scheduled within
an inch of their lives; barely a moment goes unaccounted for. Hal and his peers
live in a very narrowly focused and heavily routinized, even regimented world.

There is one ritual that Hal indulges in outside of the routine imposed on him b
y the academy s strict administrators. Well, it both is and isn t a ritual, in the w
ay I ve been using the term here. Hal crawls underneath the school, goes deep into
the labyrinthine system of ducts and vents, to secretly get high every single d
ay. His compulsion is born not entirely out of the desire to get high, though he s
a teenager so of course that s part of it. The appeal of this daily illicit act c
omes out of its secret nature. It is one of the ways he feels that he can regain
some control over his life. In this act he wrenches himself away from the tyran
ny of the regimented practices and the rote hours devoted to homework and his gr
ander pursuit of excellence.
Wallace spends a lot of words on describing various highs in Infinite Jest. Ther
e are entire multi-page end notes devoted to tracing the chemical taxonomy of va
rious drugs. There are truly disturbing scenes of heroin withdrawl. There are th
e rock-bottom stories addicts in recovery share at the halfway house. There are
performance-enhancing drugs, and recreational ones too, at the tennis academy. T
here is Hal, and his surreptitious underground tokes.
Part of the deal for Hal is that, because he invests so much meaning into the pr
ivacy of this act, and because his need for self-determination is met by retreat
ing from the world rather than interacting with it, getting high becomes an extr
eme escape. A black hole of compulsion and anxiety that, rather than manifesting
his personal liberty, becomes an act of enslavement. He becomes Sisyphus. His l
ife becomes unmanageable. It becomes entirely a thing he did not choose, and the
world for him appears smaller and smaller, until it s just him in it, totally iso
lated and automated. Hal can t jump out of the current because he can t sense the wa
ter that surrounds him.
Let s go back to Sisyphus. I said at the beginning that his story is our story. Wh
ich is a bummer, but more or less true. Day-in and day-out our lives are made up
of routines; we are fated to live out daily inconveniences, to spend so many ho
urs in traffic or preparing dinner or waiting in line. For most of us these are
small pebbles of annoyance, but after walking them up the mountain day after day
after day after day they can start to seem like Sisyphus s boulder.
But it s not all bad. Camus pointed out that the story of Sisyphus can be a joyous
one, that Sisyphus may take pleasure in his work by attuning himself to more th
an just his tedium, to delight in the absurdity of his lot. Kakfa also found a l
ittle levity in the toil of the rotten king, and exploring the relationship betw
een tedium and liberty is arguably a major motif in his body of work.
Wallace loved Kafka for this sense of humor, for his ability to take joy in the
banal tragedies of our daily lives. In another lecture Wallace gave, in 1999 at
the PEN American Centre, he lamented that some of Kafka s humour was difficult to
teach to students, that the short stories are experiential rather than teachable
. That they are hilarious without any punchlines. American students, Wallace con
tended, had been taught to presuppose that the function of a joke is to entertai
n, that a joke is something you just get. We don t necessarily get Sisyphus, and like
Gately we might not ever really get God. These are mythologies that have no clear
morals, or punch lines. We live in a world of discrete routines rather than ritu
al, which exists in a space of contradiction between the meaningful and the myst
ifying.
Wallace also remarked that his students, kind of like Hal Incandenza, had
aught to believe that the self is something a person just has. That the
t embedded in a context, part of a larger world rather than distinct from
never think to notice that they are only a fish because they live in the

been t
self is no
it. To
water.

Wallace describes how for Kafka (and so too for Sisyphus, for Hal and Gately, an
d for us) the real joke is that there is no joke. That, and I quote: the horrific

struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is insepara

ble from that horrific struggle. He put it another way at the Kenyon commencement
address. He suggested that attunement to the world outside of our narrow solips
isms, our personal toils, the tedium of our daily lives, could enliven us. That
we can be like Gately. To quote him once more, It will actually be within your po
wer to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only
meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love,
fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.