I’ve just begun the first couple hundred pages of Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, and am already addicted.  It has a distinctly Pynchonian feel to it, what with its plot-discursiveness, secret societies, comedic sidelights, and vast amount of experiential detail.  More to come later in re: the novel as a whole, but I thought I’d point out passages here and there that are particularly interesting.  If you’ve read it, I would love to hear your comments!

The scene: a mountain above Tucson. Two secret agents talk about love.

‘As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine’s grand love.  It means only the attachment.  Tine is attached, fanatically.  Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no?  What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.’

Steeply made motions of weary familiarity.  ‘Herrrrrrre we go.’

Marathe ignored this. ‘Are we not all of us fanatics?  I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know.  Attachments are of great seriousness.  Choose your attachments carefully.  Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.  What you wish to sing of as a tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen.  Die for one person?  This is a craziness.  Persons change, leave, die, become ill.  They leave, lie, go made, have sickness, betray you, die.  Your nation outlives you.  A cause outlives you.’

‘How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?’

‘You U.S.A.’s do not seem to believe that you may each choose what to die for.  Love of a woman, the sexual, it bends back in on the self, makes you narrow, maybe crazy.  Choose with care.  Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart.  Something bigger than the self.’

Steeply laid a hand between his misdirected breasts: ‘Ohh … Canada….’

Marathe leaned again forward on his stumps.  ‘Make amusement all you wish.  But choose with care.  You are what you love.  No?  You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.  You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would die without thinking for what?’

The A.F.R.’s extensive file on Steeply included mention of his recent divorce.  Marathe already had informed Steeply of the existence of this file.  He wondered how badly Steeply doubted what he reported, Marathe, or whether he assumed its truth simploy.  Though the persona of him changed, Steeply’s car for all field assignments was this green sedan subsidized by a painful ad for aspirin upon its side – the file knew this stupidity – Marathe was sure the sedan with its aspirin advertisement was somewhere below them, unseen.  The fanatically beloved car of M. Hugh Steeply.  Steeply was watching or gazing at the darkness of the desert floor.  He did not respond.  His expression of boredom could be real or tactical, either of these.

Marathe said, ‘This, is it not the choice of the most supreme importance?  Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple?  What to love enough not to think two times?’

‘This from a man who -’

Marathe was willing that his voice not rise. ‘For this choice determines all else.  No?  All other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple.  What is the temple, thus, for U.S.A.’s?  What is it, when you fear that you must protect them from themselves, if wicked Québecers conspire to bring the Entertainment into their warm  homes?’

Steeply’s face had assumed the openly twisted sneering expression which he knew well Québecers found repellent on Americans. ‘But you assume it’s always choice, conscious, decision.  This isn’t just a little naive, Rémy?  You sit down with your little accountant’s ledger and soberly decide what to love?  Always?’

‘The alternatives are -’

‘What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love?  What if the temple comes to Mohammed?  What if you just love? without deciding?  You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?’

Marathe’s sniff held disdain.  ‘Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment.  Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self’s sentiments; a citizen of nothing.  You become a citizen of nothing.  You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.’

A silence ensued this.

Marathe shifted in his chair. ‘In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free.  The most pathetic of bondage. Not tragic. No songs.  You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.’

Another silence ensued.