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Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. …. And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.  … [This] is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options.

— as related by David Foster Wallace

Twelve Polished Chapters Stacked Neatly on His Desk

And then there are, as always in D.F.W., the immaculate sentences: lyric (”An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch”), descriptive (”The sides of the rural road looked chewed”), despairing (”everything is on fire, slow fire”), aphoristic (”it’s in the democratic citizen’s nature to be like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of”)

Visualizing English Word Origins