Infinte Jest: The Someday Book
Infinite Jest. The first time I heard of it, I was eighteen. I had just read Roger Federer as Religious Experience, one of the greatest pieces of writing I had ever encountered, and I had discovered David Foster Wallace. The way he wrote about Federer, the precision, the reverence, the attempt to pin down something so fluid and elusive, was unlike anything I had read before. It was as if he was trying, through language, to capture not just Federer’s game but the feeling of watching it. And I knew exactly what he meant. I had always felt that Federer was different, that he wasn’t just better but somehow outside of competition itself, that the beauty of his game lay in the way he made everything look effortless. This is how I look at Tendulkar too, when it comes to Cricket. There were other greats, of course. Nadal, Djokovic, Serena, Sampras. But Federer played as if untouched by gravity. And DFW had put that into words.
I looked him up, read about him, saw Infinite Jest mentioned over and over. I put it on a list in my head, a someday list, the kind of list that grows but is rarely acted upon. Then I saw Liberal Arts, this small film by Josh Radnor, which I loved in the way you love things that seem made for you and maybe only you. There it was again. Infinite Jest. I was still eighteen. I looked it up again, read about it again, added it again to my someday list.
Years passed. In 2023, my cousin bought me a copy on our first visit to Strand in New York. I held it in my hands, flipped through its pages, and felt something between excitement and dread. I wanted to read it, but I also wanted to have read it, to already be on the other side, looking back. Life was moving fast. I told myself someday.
Now life feels even faster, excruciatingly more difficult, more scattered. There is always something else to do, always a reason to push things forward, to delay, to tell myself that I will get to it when things calm down, when I have the time. But time does not work like that. It moves as quickly as I do. And that’s how it will be as that’s the kind of field I am in. So, if I wait for a moment when life is not in motion, I will be waiting forever.
So I started running again. I had stopped five months ago. I started reading again. I had stopped six months ago. I picked up My Struggle: Book Two by Knausgaard and finished it in two weeks. I felt like I had reclaimed something, a small part of myself that had slipped away. And then I thought, why not now?
So I am reading Infinite Jest. It will be hard. Of course it will be hard. But that is the point. It is something I not just want to do, but have to do, in the same way I have to do other hard things. I will not rush. I will not let frustration win. The plan is to keep the cadence to ten pages a day, no more. Maybe fifteen or twenty on a weekend. I will take it as it comes.
And I will log my progress. Not for anyone else, just for me. To have something to look back on, to track whatever happens to my mind while reading it. To remind myself that life is always moving, but I do not have to let it move past me.
That is it.