“these are just the hazards of being free.
—now you will say how free are we if you dangle fatal fruit before us and we cannot help ourselves from temptation. and we say “human” to you. we say that one cannot be human without freedom.
— but what of the freedom-to ? not just the free-from? not all compulsion comes from without.”
-DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, infinite jest
“the figure of death (heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of life (heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs.”
– footnote from DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’s novel “infinite jest”