Sublime

Omensetter’s Luck, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and Blood Meridian, but added Jerzy Kosinski’s little-known Steps,

marrow-level

submit that this is what the real, no‑bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.⁠6 Wallace’s

Burgess’s novel showed how to use hyperbolic language to convey deadened emotional states.

window. The man’s face falls into and out of amused expressions as he

“Datsun or nothing,” D.L. iterates to the two, and Mark Nechtr grits his teeth, producing a fine tight smile. D.L. is seen only in Datsuns. It’s a neurosis, for sure, but one so powerful as to dictate acquiescence in many amusing instances we haven’t time for.

The layers of asserting and then hedging those assertions to assert slightly more emphatically and imaginatively that would constitute Wallace’s style are beginning to form.