Sincerity

I just read a brief article about David Foster Wallace's suicide.

I took my copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again off my shelf. A friend gifted it to me. I've never read it. I'll read one of the essays tonight.

I have read This is Water. I thought it was an excellent speech.

One thing I like about Wallace is his thoughts on sincerity. He seems to have little patience with irony, with referentiality.

I remember when I first started this blog I shared one of his quotations. I'll share it again:

'The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.'

I have no patience for the kind of irony he is describing. Sincerity seems like such a great alternative.

But for some reason it is so difficult.

We have so many ideas about all the different games we should be playing.

So many ideas about power, about who's in control, about who should text who and when.

I'm thinking about men and women, about dating and sex.

Relationships, both platonic and romantic, are where I crave sincerity above all.

I want to tell someone I love them and I want to mean it in a very robust sense.

I have no patience for weak conceptions of love.

If there is one word that does not need to be diluted, as so many words are, it is the L word.