Quotes About Complexity

American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch in real life, hard as hell to get any kind of universal handle on.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

What if in fact there were ever only two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history's mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.

I think serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult in ourselves and in the world.

The weird thing is that I cared about him at the same time I found him gross. He grossed me out... And that I was so deep in my problem that I couldn't accept real, genuine, nonsexual or nonromantic or non-prettiness-type interest in me even if it was offered to me.

numinous aura)—which balcony means that even the worst latex slip-and-slide off the steeply curved cerebrum's edge would mean a fall of only a few meters to the broad butylene platform, from which a venous-blue emergency ladder can be detached and lowered to extend down past the superior temporal gyrus and Pons and abducent to hook up with the polyurethane basilar-stem artery and allow a safe shimmy down to the good old oblongata just outside the rubberized meatus at ground zero.

Hal finds himself riveted at something about the degenerating game that seems so terribly abstract and fraught with implications and consequences that even thinking about how to articulate it seems so complexly stressful that being almost incapacitated with absorption is almost the only way out of the complex stress.

people who feel that fiction should be easy to read, that it's a popular medium

Matriculations, gender quotas, recruiting, financial aid, room-assignments, mealtimes, rankings, class v. drill schedules, prorector-hiring, accommodating changes in drill schedule consequent to a player's movement up or down a squad. It's all the sort of thing that's uninteresting unless you're the one responsible, in which case it's cholesterol-raisingly stressful and complex.

Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti- interesting? Because

Infinite Jest specifically: an endlessly, compulsively entertaining book that stingily withholds from readers the core pleasures of mainstream novelistic entertainment, among them a graspable central narrative line, identifiable movement through time

Or that he's slow, Hal's brother is, technically, Stanford-Binet-wise, slow, the Brandeis C.D.C. found---but not, verifiably not, retarded or cognitively damaged or bradyphrenic, more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epistemically bent, a pole poked into mental water and just a little off and just taking a little bit longer, in the manner of all refracted things.

peacocks of diverse idiosyncrasy

Derivatives're just trig with some imagination.

The fact that twenty years have gone by and we still do not agree what this novel means, or what exactly it was trying to say, despite saying (seemingly) everything about everything, is yet another perfect analogy for the Internet. Both are too big. Both contain too much. Both welcome you in. Both push you away.

Infinite Jest (IV) Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Pam Heath (?), 'Madame Psychosis' (?); 78 mm.; 90 minutes(?); color; sound. Unfinished, unseen attempt at completion of Infinite Jest (III) UNRELEASED

It's the same sort of block some people get with the Mean-Value Theorem. Or in Optics when we get to color fields. At a certain level of abstraction it's like the brain recoils.

sometimes in the same week. There might even be—though

The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations.

It may be that mathematics is not generally recognized as one of the arts precisely because so much pyramidal training and practice is required in order to appreciate its aesthetics; math is perhaps the ultimate in acquired tastes.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it's just words.

La Broma Infinita / D. F. Wallace

In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch.

may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes