Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

  Our time on Earth is finite. On average, about four thousand weeks long.

And that thought terrifies me.

Enter Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, a self-help-ish book about how to rework our relationship with time. If you’ve ever taken a peek at my to-do lists, you’re likely to see why such a book is necessary for me. I want to do it all, I feel like there’s never enough time, and I’m perpetually afraid of having wasted time that is irrecoverable.

But Oliver Burkeman is here to say, “Settle down, Proust, everything you want is impossible anyway!” (Hooray?). Burkeman’s central claim in the text is that we hold on to unhealthy—and even cruel—beliefs about time that are working against our actual lives. No matter what we aim to accomplish, it will never be finished. One task done, another pops up, and the idea of somehow gaining mastery over time is actually a disabling belief that prevents us from doing what is actually important.

In contrast to many books in the self-help genre, Burkeman is not giving you a list of rules to follow in order to make better use of your time (“how to stop procrastinating”, and all that type jazz). In fact, the sense of productivity culture that underlies those types of books is something Burkeman is challenging. In one passage he writes the following:

The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work, in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after school activities, generate more profit for your employer, and yet paradoxically you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result.

Thus, in a sense, even if we could be more productive: would it even be sensible to follow-through? For whom are we expending our time? The passage continues with a reference to Edward T. Hall’s suggestion that “Time moves like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones, and becoming more productive just seems to cause the belt to speed up, or eventually to break down.” A lot of people, I would suggest, are in “break down” mode precisely because there is no keeping up with the endless tasks we are required to accomplish. In Burkeman’s words, “It’s now common to encounter reports, especially from younger adults of an all-encompassing, bone-deep burnout, characterized by an inability to complete basic daily chores, the paralyzing exhaustion of a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean, production machines.” I feel that.

In fact, a lot of what Burkeman discusses is deeply relatable and he continues to focus on the psychological, physical, and existential impacts of measured time. I almost felt a faint hint of Mark Fisher’s comments with respect to capitalism and time. This is particularly true in the following quotation that Burkeman presents:

Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day. And this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to become more productive, which seemed to have the effect of pushing the genuinely important stuff ever-further over the horizon. Our days are spent trying to get through tasks in order to get them out of the way, with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters—and worrying in the meantime that we don’t measure up, that we might lack the drive or stamina to keep pace with the speed at which life now seems to move. The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency.

Just impeccable. I feel like our relationship to time, productivity, and capitalism are all linked in this passage. The idea of contrasting what life is supposed to be with what it has become as a result of constant productivity and capital is, in my view, very well articulated—especially because so much of it is ubiquitous in our systems. The line about having to raise our hands to pee is something that is so common in schools and reinforces the idea that we must live according to others’ expectations and timelines. From a personal standpoint, I see myself in the characterization that “this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to become more productive, which seemed to have the effect of pushing the genuinely important stuff ever-further over the horizon.” The idea of trying to deal with all of the meaningless things in order to work towards the actual things is too real; it’s a deeply engrained mentality that the important things require full attention, and how can they have my full attention if I have to worry about all of the little things that don’t matter at all? I am trying to cope with my “joyless urgency.”

Burkeman notes that our relationship to time has changed because we are in a situation of “task-oriented living” versus whatever we have now. In task-oriented living, Burkeman argues, “the rhythms of life are governed by tasks rather than abstract timelines”. He makes reference to a medieval farmer who would wake with the sun, sleep with the dusk, and allow the length of day to vary based on the season. Just as an aside, I think that the example could have been about Indigenous people in Canada as much as about medieval farmers, but I digress. The key part here is that “there was no need to think of time as abstract and separate from life.” An example that really resonated with me is that, Burkeman says, “You milked the cows when they needed milking and harvested the crops when it was harvest time and anybody who tried to impose an external schedule on any of that, for example doing a month’s milking in a single day to get it out of the way, or by trying to make the harvest come sooner, would rightly have been considered a lunatic.” Here I am: a lunatic. Despite reading this book and gaining a lot from it, I still am trying to work weeks ahead in my daily planner to somehow clear my schedule of all responsibilities. Yet, responsibilities can’t be handled like this. In the separation of task-oriented living towards more abstract-time based living, we have gained a great deal of anxiety. For the medieval farmer, “There was no anxious pressure to get everything done, either, because a farmer’s work is infinite. There will always be another milking and another harvest forever. There is no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion.” I’m struck by this characterization in its truth and also in the despair that it causes me. There will always be more to mark, there will always be more classes to plan, there will always be more book reviews to write, more video games to finish and clear off my mental load. Even entertainment-based activities are reframed as tasks.

Just to expand a little further, Burkeman refers to “those days before clocks.” In those times, he says, “when you when you did need to explain how long something might take, your only option was to compare it with some other concrete activity. Medieval people might talk of a task lasting a miserere while, the time it took to recite psalm 50, known as the miserere from the Bible, or alternatively, a pissing while, which should require no explanation.” I feel like there is some resonance here. We have the trace of those comparative measurements lingering in our language, but overall we try to quantify in abstract terms. It’s ten minutes up the street, it’s going to be a fifteen hour project, and so on. Even as I am about to begin an additional qualifications course, I’m told how many hours I’m expected to spend, not what tasks I’m expected to complete. In a comparative-task measurement, Burkeman says,

one can imagine that experience would have felt expansive and fluid, suffused with something it might not be an exaggeration to call a kind of magic. Notwithstanding the many real privations of his existence, our peasant farmer might have sensed a luminous, awe-inspiring dimension to the world around him, untroubled by the notion of time ticking away, he might have experienced a heightened awareness of the vividness of things, the feeling of timelessness [...] living in deep-time.

It is a kind of magic in those moments when we are free of time, liberated from it. Instead, he suggests, we do everything we can to “avoid the painful constraints of reality” and focus instead on being productive, of ignoring those bright moments of tranquility.

There’s an addictive quality into task-completion. The people that used to refer to themselves as “workaholics” in job interviews as a cheeky ‘worst quality’ may have been more truthful than they thought. Especially if alcoholism is a means of escaping reality and trying to regain a sense of control of your life, productivity addiction runs parallel. Burkeman notes how common it is for “well-paid, high status, overachievers” to be “accustomed to a life of constant motion.” He sees their “pulsing sense of urgency [as] a form of self-medication, something they were doing as a way to not feel something else.” He then gives the example a woman who feels anxiety whenever she slows to rest and immediately looks for active distraction as a form of “emotional avoidance.” He then continues on to note that these traits are similar to alcoholics.

Let’s focus for a moment on the idea of avoidance. Burkeman argues that “Most of our strategies for becoming more productive make things worse because they’re really just ways of furthering the avoidance. After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do.” It is indeed a bleak thought. I once did the calculation of how many books I read in a year and how many years I expect to live and when I calculate the number of books I’ll likely finish by my death is barely a drop in the bucket of all the incredible writing in the world. So we replace finitude with measurable progress towards some ambiguous dream. Not only do we not have enough time, “It’s also painful to accept your limited control over the time you do get. Maybe you simply lack the stamina or talent or other resources to perform well in all the roles that you feel you should. So rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies in an effort to carry on feeling limitless.” Those lines strike me to the core. I can never simply be. I get depressed for a few weeks following the constant pressures of teaching because if I rest I do not feel I have “accomplished” anything. Trying to gain control this way, though, is outright unhealthy: “We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance. Or we implement time management systems that promise to make time for everything so that tough choices won’t be required. Or we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotence control over life, because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an intimidating project.” It’s hard not to see myself reflected in this: unable to make decisions, so drowning in tasks that require low stakes. I also think back, though, to my literary theory professor who made the comment that if something said “no experience necessary” it really meant “no experience gained.” Same thing here with choices. We avoid important choices so we never really have to live.

Burkeman links to other sociologists, theorists, and philosophers to help make the case. In this section, he refers to Nietzsche to explain how we “fill our minds with business and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally.” In Nietzsche’s words, “We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life [...] because to us it is even more necessary to not have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.” This can take many forms, whether it be distraction of meaningless nonsense (cf. any meme on Facebook), or, Burkeman states, “we plan compulsively, because the alternative is to confront how little control over the future we really have.”

There are some political implications here, which I think takes Burkeman’s work a step beyond the general self-help tone. Burkeman notes how “most of us seek a specifically individualistic mastery over time” and that “our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whatever you want.” It becomes clear why capitalism and individualism and time have all bound together in this unhealthy spiral. What is clear to Burkeman, though, is that we do this “because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing from marriage and parenting to business or politics depends on cooperating with others, and therefore exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.” I would go one step further to suggest that this is precisely why the system gets maintained as it is. If, for instance, a company does not want its workers to unionize, what better way than to promote an individualistic sense of time—I am what matters to me, and who has the time to organize and work together? Again—we are distracted from the important work.

In another section, Burkeman addresses the blight of social media. I think it’s commonplace to recognize that our devices distract us from things that are more important. But Burkeman takes that one step further. He says that it’s not simply that devices distract us from things that are more important, but that “they change how we’re defining important matters in the first place. [...] They sabotage our capacity to want what we want to want.” He elaborates on the idea of social media and discusses our instances of heightened judgment of others that occur as a result of seeing a narrow window into them, rather than the full picture. But also, time eats away at us after such moments. For instance, when I see something politically egregious online and I’m out in the world later I think about how I might respond. Burkeman makes that case and says we even retrain our brains to think about how we will share moments afterward—while we’re still in them. Again, connecting politically, Burkeman notes his “unpaid role as a creator of content for Twitter” and how the entire format has been crafted by teams of psychologists. One of the reasons I find Burkeman’s text so rich is that it connects to so many discourses. I feel like these observations serve as a launch pad for so many rich epistemological, political, and existential questions.

 Returning to the personal level for now, Burkeman offers the true, if depressing, observation that we will never do all of what we actually want to do. Since there is so much to do in the world, “At any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything and by the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around doing virtually nothing of the things you theoretically could have done.” This sounds pretty bleak. Thank goodness Burkeman follows it up by reframing the discussion around choices: “the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.” As a phrase, “neglecting the right things” would have served as a good subtitle for the book and as a good piece of advice in general.

At the end of the day, Burkeman focuses on the ways that these relationships to time are unhealthy and harmful for us. As we chase more and more accomplishment and productivity, he writes, “There is a sort of cruelty [...] in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach and many of us would never dream of demanding of other people. The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then, pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble, and get started on them today.” It’s about as practical as advice in the book gets. As I mentioned, it’s more of a theoretical explanation than a simple enhance-your-productivity checklist. He asks a critical question that I think hits at the heart of our relationships with time and productivity: “In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you’re who you are and not the person you think you ought to be?” I think so much of our pain surrounding time is related to that disconnect of what we expert of ourselves and what is actually realistic. I struggle with that myself. Burkeman says, though, that we cannot treat the present day as part of a journey towards some version of ourselves we think we ought to be. There’s a sadness in that mentality that is implicit in the trouble of all overachievers, I think: “Once you’ve earned your right to exist, you tell yourself, life will stop feeling so uncertain and out of control.” But we already have and it never does, anyway. We do not have to prove ourselves, and even if we did, the measure would be, quite frankly, impossible anyway.

Before the review ends, I want to thank you for taking the time to read it (and all of my reviews for 2024). The fact that you have finite time and that you have chosen to spend some of it with me reading, thinking about, and responding to books means the world. I hope you have a year of restfulness, a year of accomplishment, and a year of neglecting the right things.

Happy reading; happy new year.

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

    David Foster Wallace is a controversial literary figure. His work is generally gruelling and I’d say at times hostile to his audience. Yet, despite his punishing style, he retains an (often diehard) following that routinely touts his genius. I can’t help but find myself compelled to explore this phenomena and attempt at least some explanation for why, alongside his other works, The Pale King is a divisive moment in literature.

    Returning to core themes from his previous novel, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace began a draft of The Pale King, a novel unfinished at the time of his suicide in 2008. The book reconsiders attention, perception, and boredom, this time from the angle of IRS agents in the late 70s and 80s as the institution attempts to reconcile itself with an increasingly digital world. The novel progresses as, essentially, a series of vignettes, interviews, newspaper clippings, and conversations, each focusing on a sort of dream-team of IRS agents, each with a traumatic past and a particular quirk that makes them specifically good for such a mundane job. 

    I am no stranger to maximalism. I’ve read some of Thomas Pynchon’s massive tomes, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. These books are brutal. The sheer number of characters to keep track of, the detailed descriptions of minutiae, and the extent of background knowledge you’re expected to bring to the text form all kinds of barriers to engagement with the work. I think, perhaps, that’s why these authors get such cult-like followings: only the initiates have proven themselves smart enough to engage with these texts and they form a society of the talented few to discuss their interpretations—either that, or the sunk cost fallacy appears in literature as much as in gambling.

    That being said, of the maximalist writers with whom I’m familiar, David Foster Wallace is the one that most justifies the use of the form. Infinite Jest, for example, is well over a thousand pages and has hundreds of meandering footnotes, but the whole book revolves around themes of obsession and the form emulates the pitfalls of such obsession (it’s in this way that I think of DFW’s writing as somewhat hostile to its audience—it illuminates its readers as it dismantles them). The Pale King offers a similar set of keys for reading it that justify its boring bits—or rather, most of the book.

    From the very first chapter, The Pale King outlines the central themes around perception. Wallace gives an extraordinary lush description of a setting—the early chapters of The Pale King are, in my opinion, DFW at his most ‘literary’—which concludes as follows:

“Your shoes’ brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks’ burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se, NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture’s crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these” (6).

The final sentence of the first chapter is two simple words that offer a kind of treatise for the book’s overall project: “Read these.” There’s a full list of items that comes before: “socks’ burrs”, for instance, that are all compressed by that simple pronoun “these.” Of course, due to its proximity to the final sentence, I read “the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail” as the objects of interest. First, I think that such a lush description of dried worms in dung is a bold subversive move, but I also appreciate how DFW turns the reader’s attention to something completely below our interest. People are more likely to turn away in revulsion or simply not examine dung on the ground, and yet that is where he forces our attention. Each of the other items in the list is a shorter, more direct sentence: the embellishment comes on that most unpleasant and most explicitly non-communicative. I can picture dried worms twisting into nearly-letters to examine.

    This passage, in my mind, sets up the tone for the rest of the book. It teaches us to pay attention to the minutiae and in so many ways the book recycles that theme for further consideration. The book is a matter of scope and perspective. As such, using the IRS as a milieu is a perfect vehicle for exploring these themes.

    Of course, DFW had not completed the novel at the time of his death, but it does appear that he sequenced the extant chapters and left some notes behind to elaborate on intentions. In a note for an “embryonic outline”, Wallace notes two broad arcs: “1. Paying attention, boredom, ADD, Machines vs. people at performing mindless jobs” (547)—check!—and “2. Being individual vs. being part of larger things — paying taxes, being ‘lone gun’ in the IRS vs. team player” (547). Of the two, the first is by far the more obvious and more clearly well-developed. The latter, however, is interesting in its own right to see how the “embryonic” motif begins to emerge.

    Again in an early section of the book, Wallace provides a kind of key passage for addressing that theme (how considerate that the themes are established early, actually!). Reflecting on auto manufacturing, Wallace writes that

“Each car, not only parked by a different human individual but conceived, designed, assembled from parts each one of which was designed and made, transported, sold, financed, purchased, and insured by human individuals, each with life stories and self-concepts that all fit together into a larger pattern of facts. Reynold’s dictum was that reality was a fact-pattern the bulk of which was entropic and random. The trick was homing in on which facts were important – Reynolds was a rifle to Sylvanshine’s shotgun” (18).

In this moment, the two themes seem to converge. On the one hand, we are asked to consider the relationship between data and information. Deciding “which facts were important” is critical to interpreting the world (not to mention the novel itself), so it is once again a matter of where to focus attention. At the same time, though, we are offered an image of a literal assemblage. The mass of cars are all driven by individual people, pointing to that relationship between the individual and mass society (there’s no parking in the front/back lot of the IRS), but even what we consider individual—one car—is only possible through a number of steps all completed by different individuals and manufactured from a range of parts.

    In a later section, several IRS employees have a conversation about the nature of the American citizen, suggesting that “We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities” (138). Wallace posits a thesis of sorts that the rebellion of the 1960s produced an overwhelmingly counter-effect to our common knowledge. The logic progresses that hippies, under the guise of peace and love and togetherness, actually succeeded in pushing for individualism. As hippies dodged the draft, for example, they asserted the individual over the communal “good” of fighting in Vietnam (and of course I use quotation marks to note the absurdity of Vietnam war). The conversation then continues to discuss how that individualism is easy to commodify—certain modes of consumption become markers of rebelliousness, yet remain subservient to a system of consumption. Meanwhile, our individual consumption creates the society we, as individuals, decry. The conversation continues:

“We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries—we’re actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation’s responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie? [...] ‘Corporations make the pie. They make it and we eat it.’ [...] Something has happened where we’ve decided on a personal level that it’s alright to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interest business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.’ [….] ‘But the whole dark genius of corporations is that they allow for individual reward without individual obligation. The workers’ obligations are to the executives, and the executives’ obligations are to the CEO, and the CEO’s obligation is to the Board of Directors, and the Board’s obligation is to the stockholders, who are also the same customers the corporation will screw over at the very earliest opportunity in the name of profit, which profits are distributed as dividends to the very stockholders-slash-customers they’ve been fucking over in their own name. It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility” (138).

While a little on-the-nose, David Foster Wallace’s argument has a cogency that is hard to deny. I remember back to a philosophy course I took in University where the professor talked about how whenever we are asked to vote, politicians need to appeal to self-interest. That the politician will lower your taxes, for instance, accrues them a vote, because we tend to substitute our individual wants for the collective. If a politician guaranteed a better society for a group you’re not a part of, you’d have to have a pretty incredible sense of ethics to vote against yourself. Wallace’s statement “fugue of evaded responsibility” is particularly illuminating in this respect.

    While the individual-vs-society motif emerges economically (they do work for the IRS, after all!), the conversation then takes a philosophical bent wherein

“the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than ‘die,’ ‘pass away,’ the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday—’” (145).

This is another passage where multiple themes converge. Of course there’s the layer where we consider our relationships with others as an individual, but there’s also a layer in which our individual fears are collective. Everyone seems to share the fear that time is passing and we are all dying. This fear of losing time runs parallel to the way we spend our attention, of course—and fear is itself a motif in the text. 

    When Wallace explores the relationship between surface and depth (or lack thereof), that same existential dread re-emerges. At least one character espouses a nihilistic lack of meaning underneath phenomena, while another considers Franklin D. Roosevelt’s statement that “there’s nothing to fear but fear itself” and adds yet another layer to it, suggesting that the fear of fear is something to be afraid of. (Incidentally, In some ways, that was my experience with The Pale King: I was afraid to read it. I thought it was another 800 page slog waiting on my shelf, despite it being only around 550. I was afraid I wouldn’t “get it” (and sure, there are gaps in my lazy readings, so that one might be accurate).)

    There’s something to be said for the relationship between fear and interest, of course. Wallace describes the efficacy of dullness for the IRS, “one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities [the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex] help insulate them against public protest and political opposite, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy” (86). He goes on to note that the “great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting. People are drawn to secrets; they can’t help it” (86). I am compelled to consider surface and depth here. With secrecy, there is an unexplored depth that can never be reached [cf. that whole thesis I wrote about paranoia in 2020]. With boredom, there is complete transparency which, ironically, obfuscates: 

“consider the fact that just about every last transcript, record, study, white paper, code amendment, revenue-ruling, and procedural memo has been available for public perusal since date of issue. No FOIA filing even required. But not one journalist seems ever to have checked them out, and with good reason: This stuff is solid rock. The eyes roll up white by the third or fourth. You just have no idea.” (86)

This, essentially, is what distinguishes The Pale King (or Infinite Jest) from other maximalist novels: it capitalizes on boredom. It understands its relationship with the mundane. Ultimately, Wallace offers the following explanation for “why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull” (87). He posits that “dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from” or that

“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down” (87).

To me this forms a central question of the text. In my hazy recollection of Infinite Jest, I think a core problem is that we are amusing ourselves to death. In The Pale King, Wallace seems to delve into the reason for that, namely that boredom exposes the existential pain from which we are always striving to escape via Muzak and TV. Considering it this way, The Pale King, for all its purported humour, could be reframed as a horror novel. The book is inflicting boredom on you—and what is more terrifying than that?

    Following from the section where Wallace turns our attention to the worms in the dung, which demands close-up scrutiny, he shifts to a plane ride where everything below becomes indistinct. This interplay is a beautiful spin that then shifts focus towards Claude Sylvanshine on his way to his new appointment at the IRS. He reflects, “knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress” (16). The prospect of stress is itself a stress (like how fear of fear is fear). He considers the “disastrous consequences fear and stress could bring about” (16) before then shifting to considerations of perspective, literally and figuratively. He wonders if people can trick themselves into just not thinking and worries everyone knows the trick but him: “He tended to conceptualize some ultimate, platonic-level Terror as a bird of prey in whose mere aloft shadow the prey was stricken and paralyzed, trembling as the shadow enlarged and became inevitability” (17). It’s noteworthy that his fear is characterized as something with greater perspective that can view him from a distance before, presumably, swooping down on him. He asks himself, “What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?” (17) before noting that “Tedium is like stress but its own Category of Woe” (17). He then lists all the most tedious accounting-based jargon that pops into his head—boring for us and a terror to him. They then begin the descent and Wallace plays with perspective once again, commenting on the traffic looking like it moves so slowly from above: “The whole ball game was perspective, filtering, the choice of perception’s objects. Sylvanshine tried to envision the small plane as seen from the ground” (17). The passage is important for two reasons: 1) Attention becomes an outlet to avoid boredom. Sylvanshine recognizes that his “so-called” activities (presumably our boring ones) serve as a distraction from tedium and therefore stress and therefore woe. 2) The idea that perception must focus itself in certain ways and that imagining alternate perspectives of close-up and far-away is critical to attention. I’d also posit that Wallace significantly uses “the choice of perception’s objects” to place more agency in perception itself as proprietor of objects and choice, as though our attention is guided from some unknown force in perception itself.

    We see frequent, frequent repetitions of the motif throughout the book. In one section, a character talks about how he had wanted to write a play where a rote examiner is “poring over 1040s and attachments and cross-filed W-2s and 1099s and things like that” (108) on a minimalist stage, performing a job until the audience is bored and restless so that they decide to leave. He says that “once the audience have let, the real action of the play can start. [...] Except I could never decide on the action, if there was any, if it’s a realistic play” (108). Later, a character explains how his dad liked to systematically mow the lawn in little patches and recognizing how satisfying it was. He compares his job at the IRS to that, where each file “gives you that solid little feeling” (117) before recognizing that the job never really stops. So, even when we are satisfied by the tedium there’s a kind of greater horror in that it never ends.

    The book, though, offers justification of boredom and even aggrandizes it. There are two sections where IRS trainers(?) justify the tedium. One talks about how noble the work is, building up IRS agents to the status of modern day mythic heroes, the mighty few capable of battling the boredom day-by-day to ensure that the country runs smoothly. In another section, the trainers talk about the difference between information and data. They explain how the recruits’ job is to sort out what is relevant from a mass of raw data. They must always be calculating what avenues are worth exploring (i.e. which are most likely to increase revenue). That, essentially, teaches the readers how to read this book.

    We are placed in the role of IRS agents, given a wealth of raw information that could be irrelevant and asked to determine what is worthy of our attention. Whole passages are so bogged down in minutiae and the names of different forms or the medical descriptions of vertebrae that they seem irrelevant. Whole characters don’t seem to contribute to the plot very much. There’s even a note in the back that DFW wanted to set up a series of would-be events that don’t go anywhere: a seeming terrorist attack is actually just a manure explosion, for example. I suspect that even if the novel were finished, there would be so much irrelevant information that the book itself is challenging you to adopt the IRS ethos: make a decision about what matters.

    Beyond just the content of the book, Wallace’s style demands close attention. Even at the level of the sentence, Wallace forces you to linger. There were a number of times when I thought to myself I’d finish the sentence, close the book for a break, and return later. Yet, I’d find that by the time I finished one sentence I was three quarters down the page and figured I might as well continue. One cannot simply stop mid-page, right? The compulsion to carry on is built into the very structure of the work.

    This pattern, sometimes, governed the narration of the different sections. The most notable example to me is a section narrated by the ADD-led mind of Chris Fogle, a teenage burnout who fumbles his way towards the IRS after feeling like he’s nothing. His lack of attention to what details actually matter makes his narration a thoroughly gruelling section. You beg for him to get to the point and it takes forever.

    Beyond that, though, the sections tend to be short and manageable. While the narration that weaves them together is barely explicit, they form little islands of meaning that often have their own charm. I’m unclear, exactly, why. Much of my interest seems to be in the bizarrely endearing characters that populate the novel. Even though their narrative arcs often go nowhere [in the span of over 500 pages, we barely get to see one day’s work at the office; very few of the characters interact in an ensemble], the profiles Wallace provides have a strangely compelling flavour.

    When it comes to character, one of my early favourites is the child Leonard Stecyk. He’s a nearly infallible young man, raising money for charity, baking cookies for his bullies—that kind of thing. The portrait is so absurd which would normally destroy my immersion in the text, but it’s like an overlong joke: it stops being funny before becoming funny again from its excess. DFW then takes a turn and notes how Stecyk’s school principal had fantasies of dragging Leonard behind his truck from a hook—a gruesome image that stands out more starkly due to its juxtaposition with the humour.

    Most of the characters are similarly defined by one character trait, which is narratively unsatisfying —- and yet, each character has their own charm and sometimes offers philosophical-thematic turn. For instance, Claude Sylvanshine is characterized by his Random Fact Intuition. Essentially, he’s a psychic of useless information. He’ll know how many grains of sand are on a particular stretch of beach without having counted them, but it’s rare for these details to be useful in any way. Meanwhile, David Cusk suffers from excessive sweating—and his fear of sweating makes him sweat. Again, the fear of fear emerges as the difference between surface and depth collapses. 

    In one of the final chapters, the characters all meet at a bar and it’s one of the more conventional sections, but it helps to illuminate DFW’s approach to characterization. I suspect that people who don’t like DFW don’t like him because he’s a very ‘masculine’ author, but I think there’s a particular richness to his characterization of Meredith, a beautiful woman who is concerned that her beauty prevents other people from engaging with her authentically. The premise is a little trite, but her way of speaking and her frank outline of her time in a mental hospital as a teenager helps to develop her into a character worthy of consideration. There’s a tragedy to her life wherein she marries an employee from her mental hospital with the assumption that his medical condition would kill him sooner rather than later. Now, years after the fact she seems stuck. Her conversation with Shane Drinion, a stoic and largely passive interlocutor is just the kind of dynamic that highlights her own sincerity. I found myself drawn to Drinion, as well, and DFW has a note outlining their final interaction in the book that I just wish could have been finished. When recounting meeting her husband, Meredith explains how he would ask if she wanted a casual or intense conversation. Drinion seems to have intense attention, though he’s not a great conversationalist. DFW’s note is that at their last interaction, Drinion would ask if she wanted casual or intense and she would just cry. That tenderness forms, in my mind, a human core to an otherwise cerebral work. 

    By contrast, some of the other female characters are admittedly not given proper treatment. Chahla Neti-Neti serves as a tour guide for David Foster Wallace when he arrives at the IRS for his first day. She leads him around impatiently before enacting oral sex on him, thinking he was a different David Wallace. She’s a nothing character—Googling her name reveals neti-neti to be Sanskrit for “not this, not that”). Toni Ware is given very little attention and is disconnected from the main narrative. Her origin story is horrific—she’s only able to avoid being murdered because of her incredible capacity to not blink—but overall her character does not seem to really be that significant (perhaps because other characters see her as “damaged goods” and so avoid her). 

    The most irritating of the characters, as I mentioned earlier, is Chris Fogle. I think it’s characters like this that are one of the more contentious elements of Wallace’s writing. Chris Fogle is a college student who cuts class, changes majors, has no direction, does drugs, etc. but has a secret kind of genius. Despite the fact that the novel hardly romanticizes his burnout, I feel like it’s the kind of figure the most annoying people you know identify with. The fact that he can’t stop talking about irrelevant tangents doesn’t help. Ultimately, his section of the book is the one that most wore me down; by necessity it needs to be sprawling to encapsulate his voice but I definitely was counting the pages until the focus changed. That said, thematically his section has a lot to offer, namely when he accidentally stumbles into an accounting class final and has an almost religious experience similar to an actually religious experience that he criticized in another character. For those that are curious, his special claim to fame is that he seems to have discovered a sequence of numbers that, when recited, gives him the ability to hyperfocus. Since this is an unfinished work, that doesn’t really get expanded on yet.

    It wouldn’t be a David Foster Wallace novel if there weren’t some sneaky contrivances, though, so David Foster Wallace appears as a character and frames the book as a memoir, offering his first-person metacritique, replete with his characteristic footnotes. After the first few chapters, David Foster Wallace announces the presence of him, the author, and offers a foreword to the book partway through. It’s an amusing turn that he then justifies as needing to be done for legal purposes. He then expounds on the truth-value of the work and says he actually did work for the IRS and that these are all real people. It’s almost convincing. I’m curious to know where this particular character would have gone, particularly because in one of the notes DFW had for the novel, it was that the David Foster Wallace character would disappear altogether after the first hundred pages or so—again an amusing turn since DFW’s main story arc is that he mistakenly took over the identity of another IRS agent named David Wallace after a computer programming glitch collapsed their files.

    There’s quite a bit of this absurdist humour interspersed throughout the book, which emerges (generally) in its excess. If it’s not Leonard Stecyk’s characterization as an excessively good boy, it’s the chapter dedicated to an account of him saving his shop teacher from bleeding out. There’s a baby in a man’s office—not his own—that is purportedly able to talk and behave like an adult. There’s a chapter where a horde of mosquitos disastrously ruins a picnic. One character, as a child, has the ambition to kiss every inch of his own body, which leads to some absurd contortions and medical problems and overly long lips. For me, these scenes are less impactful than the more serious ones—and again, it’s a particular brand of humour that might divide readers. I often question when people find DFW funny. Sure, kind of. But even in those moments of humour I see such a darkness that it’s hard to laugh about them.

    The Pale King is one of those books that teaches you how to read it. It forces your perspective in particular ways, commands attention to irrelevant details, and then aggrandizes the power of boredom. Since the book is written in a series of short bursts, it essentially forms these little islands of meaning that serve as keys (to extend the archipelagic metaphor: Florida Keys?) to the rest of the text. Really, DFW sets up a model of literature wherein you are presented with an excess of raw data. It’s your job to sit with the boredom and, like the IRS, determine which information is most relevant.

    This being the case, it’s completely understandable why some people have an aversion to David Foster Wallace’s writing. It is literal boredom. The book is not there to entertain—I think even the claims for its humour might be trap doors—but instead to force you into a different mode of being. Yet, the end goal here is fraught with challenge. As I mentioned, the book is somewhat hostile to its audience; when the boy who wants to kiss every inch of his body essentially breaks his spine, DFW refers to the different causes, the vertebrae, the symptoms, and so forth all in medical jargon. He provides the raw data; where a more poetic writer might put the pain in comprehensible terms, DFW expects you to bust out your medical dictionary to engage with the work.

    Ultimately, I’m torn on Wallace’s project because two very conflicting strands emerge. Earlier, I cited from a conversation where dullness is psychic pain because there is nothing to “distract ourselves from feeling” and that there’s “something else, way down” causing us suffering that boredom forces us to confront. Yet, there’s also the aggrandizing of boredom that ennobles the work of the IRS—boredom as heroism. In one of the notes about the direction of the novel, DFW says that “Drinion is happy. Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss – a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom” (548). 

I’m really struck by this note, particularly since it’s in the final pages of the unfinished manuscript. I love the phrase “Constant bliss in every atom” and all its bittersweet implications. Like Chris Fogle’s experience, it does sound religious in its flavour: a kind of reverence to that which is undeserving of it. I’m curious to know if this is the experience of the diehard David Foster Wallace fans: do they push through the boredom to find the ecstasy? Or are they in denial about their own experience.

    For myself, I’m neither one nor the other. I appreciate what Wallace is up to, and I think his form is a perfect match for his style. In that way, he does encapsulate his motifs in a way I cannot imagine anyone else being able to achieve. It’s not exactly a fun read, but it is one that provides some rich rewards, the richer when you’re more thoughtful. I suspect that’s one of the key areas of divisiveness for works like this: what do you want your reading to do? It has beautiful moments, but its key purpose is not beauty. It has philosophical ideas, but their applicability is hazy at best. It’s not like you’re likely to find yourself by reading such absurd characterizations. Yet, it undeniably has literary value and is worth close attention. Wallace is establishing an alternative epistemological mode to train you how to read differently, which I suppose is a kind of ethics of attention [cf. my final paper for my graduate Beckett seminar]. 

    If nothing else, The Pale King is a book that commands attention—but how that attention gets spent; well, that’s up to you.