It's been thirteen years since David Foster Wallace decided to take his own life in Claremont, a college town in the eastern part of Los Angeles County in California, in the States, hanging himself from a beam in his home at only 46 years old. His father stated that he had been suffering from severe depression for over twenty years, which he tried to treat with both medication and electroconvulsive therapy. He was my last favorite American writer, and I want to remember him with these words taken from his last unfinished novel, which I have yet to read, namely "The Pale King," published three years after his death in 2011.



[...] Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, mine and yours, the thing that we try to avoid thinking about directly all the time, that we are tiny and at the mercy of great forces and that time passes relentlessly and that each day we have lost another day that will never return, and our childhood is over and with it adolescence and the vigor of youth, and soon adulthood too, that everything we see around us is just decaying and fading away, everything is leaving and so are we, so am I, from how these first forty-two years have zipped by, not long from now I will be gone too. Who would have ever imagined that there could be a truer way to say "die," "leave," the mere sound makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a winter Sunday [...]