Cliched Truth<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In one section of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which turned 20 this year, we follow Don Gately, erstwhile expert in breaking and entering\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/03\/cliched-truth\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Cliched Truth\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In one section of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which turned 20 this year, we follow Don Gately, erstwhile expert in breaking and entering\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/03\/cliched-truth\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Leithart\" \/>\n<meta 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{"id":17982,"date":"2016-03-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2797"},"modified":"2016-03-23T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-23T00:00:00","slug":"cliched-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/03\/cliched-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Cliched Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In one section of David Foster Wallace\u2019s Infinite Jest<\/a>, which turned 20 this year, we follow Don Gately, erstwhile expert in breaking and entering (B&E) and addict, to a meeting of a Boston chapter of AA. Wallace gives us several harrowing glimpses into addiction, one of which comes from \u201cJohn L.,\u201d who shares at the meeting at Ennet House recovery center:<\/p>\n

\u201d. . . then you\u2019re in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed his smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it\u2019s the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it\u2019s you<\/em>, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you<\/em>, and the puke-, drool- and Substance-crusted T-shirt you\u2019ve both worn for weeks now get torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where you heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest\u2019s center and center-less eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you\u2019ve been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land it. You see now that It\u2019s your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It\u2019s gotten you into is undeniable and you still <\/em>can\u2019t stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still <\/em>can\u2019t stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. . . . You are in a kind of hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around\u201d (347).<\/p>\n

If few writers can match Wallace\u2019s vivid inventiveness, many can write harrowing addiction stories. But Wallace goes on to describe the miracle of recovery:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe process is the neat reverse of what brought you down and In here: Substances start out being so magically great, so much the interior jigsaw\u2019s missing piece, that at the start you just known, deep in your gut, that they\u2019ll never let you down; you just know it. But they do. And then this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharin grins and hideous coffee is so lame that you just know <\/em>there\u2019s no way it could ever possible work except for the utter morons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, \u201cyou heed the improbable warnings because by now you have no faith in your own sense of what\u2019s really improbable and what isn\u2019t, since AA seems, improbably enough, to be working, and with no faith in your own senses you\u2019re confused, flummoxed, and when people with A time strongly advise you to keep coming you nod robotically and keeping coming, and you sweep floors and scrub out ashtrays and fill stained steel urns with hideous coffee, and you keep getting ritually down on your big knees every morning and night asking for help from a sky that still seems a burnished shield against all who would ask aid of it \u2013 how can you pray to a \u2018God\u2019 you believe only morons believe in, still? \u2013 but the old guys say it doesn\u2019t yet matter what you believe or don\u2019t believe, Just Do It they say, and like a shock-trained organism without any kind of independent human will you do exactly like you\u2019re told, you keep coming and coming, nightly, and now you take pains not to get booted out of the squalid halfway house you\u2019d at first tried to get discharged from, you Hang In and Hang In, meeting after meeting, warm day after cold day . . . ; and not only does the urge to get high stay more or less away, but more general life-quality-type things . . . things seem to get progressively somehow better, inside, for a while, then worse, then even better. . . . (350)\u201d<\/p>\n

Which goes to show you, Gately tells the new residents at Ennet House, \u201cthe truth is usually not just un- but anti-interesting.\u201d Every one of AA\u2019s \u201cseminal little mini-epiphanies . . . is always polyesterishly banal\u201d (358). <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"