This past week we had two unfortunate incidents relating writing and death. The first was the passing of author David Foster Wallace. Like many other contemporaries of Wallace’s I found his masterpiece Infinite Jest simultaneously aggravating and exhilarating. His non-fiction on the other hand gleamed with a face-against-the window realism and detail that most writers skip over in place of rote facts and tired cliché’s. I once read that the farther you get away from the visual and the tactile in the arts, the higher your chance of suicide. There is a very real difficulty holding treads in both worlds—one world that inspires and sometimes lets you down and another that you create out of reflections, alphabets and inspiration.
The second incident was the train tragedy in Los Angeles. Communication tilts many dominoes every day: an inside stock tip, an unforeseen ‘I love you’ and on the business side a follow up email from a vendor. Rarely, but occasionally, the delivery of communication fails us. A minor, real-life, case of this would be my email being down this morning when I needed to send a final file to a client. A major case of it would be the yet to be substantiated claims that the conductor of the crash in Chatsworth missed a track signal because he was texting on his cell phone.
Choosing what to communicate is very important. Choosing when to communicate is vital.
Respectfully,
Ian Alexander