Seven Pages of Solitude

I’m participating in this online book-clubbish thing called Infinite Summer where the basic idea is to read  Infinite Jest – the entire 948 page book – between June 21^st and September 22^nd. This means that the actual literal summer has been and will be consumed by this book.

I’ve been at it since June 21^st with a few stops and starts. The first 200 pages of this book are notoriously difficult to get through, and it didn’t help that I left the book in Pennsylvania on a road trip around page 95, forcing me to take a breather while I waited for it to be returned. That also gave me time to lose my wits, and it took me more than a week and half after getting it back to convince myself it would be worth it to begin again. I did, finally, and as soon as I hit page 201 I was in full blown ecstatic and unadulterated love with this book.

I have hardly been able to put it down since.

However, it only takes a quick glance at the Infinite Summer website to see that there are other people participating in Infinite Summer that aren’t having as joyous a time of it. I can see why that would be the case. The plot is far from linear. In fact, there is very little at this point (page 575 for me) that has revealed itself as actual standard plot at all. I just passed end note 238 of many, many more. There are as many characters as an old Chinese play (read: a TON). I can hardly keep the names straight. Time is fractured in the book, and very difficult to keep track of unless you are taking notes along the way. It really requires that or constant flipping back to other sections to see where things stand in relation to each other.

I can’t honestly tell you that I haven’t been annoyed or perturbed at these things from time to time. I have had my sour moments, but I have realized that even those moments are part of what I love about my experience of this book.

Let me try to put it succinctly (as succinctly as I am able, at least): I love Infinite Jest because it contains a world that is more human and alive than most of the rest of my life right now. I have found that reading it is like looking in a mirror and seeing my bleeding and raw heart fractured and divided between the many characters in the book. The world it portrays is more human than even I am most of the time, I think.

You see, I have been living in a world that seems to ignore everything but the mind. It doesn’t take into account or even allow for Kate Gompert-esque feelings of depression, the looming possibility and potential of addiction that seems to be on every side in our culture, or the fact that people die often and more people than any of us are inclined to admit are disabled and these are real parts of real life that can’t just be covered up or talked away or analyzed into submission. I am normally inclined to blame this world on stuff that is outside of me: school, culture, etc. I think, though, that I’m coming to see that its me that has created this world for me. I have understood the reality of those things listed above many times before now, but I haven’t really let myself stop to let them be my reality, even when they are my reality. I have held my breath, waiting for them to pass, to get back to normal whatever that is. But now I see that those things – and my feelings about them – are normal.

All this comes about because I have taken a few hits to my heart and a few hits to my life this year, and instead of running from it all for the first time in my life I’m trying to face it down. Its hard though, and I am thankful that I have these crazy, addicted, broken and messed up characters to come home to day after day. In them I have found companionship and through that companionship I have started finding the strength and ability to hold the threads of my mind and soul together in moments where they would surely be more unraveled otherwise.

In writing these things I know I am simplifying one of the most complex books on the market right now. There is so much depth and so much to be thought about in regards to this book. But I’m not reading it to think about it this time around. I am reading it to feel it and to see what it feels out in me. There is much that it contains that should be (and is on other blogs and at the Infsum website) intellectually analyzed and bantered about. But honestly, I don’t care that I don’t know what is happening in the book. I don’t care that I don’t know where it is going to end. I don’t even care that I’m not trying to figure it out. My Infinite Summer wasn’t started as, nor has it turned into a quest to understand. Rather is more of a lesson in being human and being free to feel whatever it is I need to feel. Uncovering and learning to respect my own humanity was what I wanted my summer to be about from the beginning, and I am so glad that IJ popped up to assist me through it.

I’m content leaving the in-depth analysis to those with the time and the brain energy for it. In the mean time I’ll weep out loud and laugh out loud alternately, unashamedly, and consistently until September 22^nd.