Author! Author!

So there goes David Foster Wallace, joining Thomas M. Disch, Stefan Zweig, Hunter S. Thompson, H. Beam Piper, Hart Crane, Virginia Woolf... too many to mention. All those writers who decided to, um, become their own sternest editors. Language is the great differentiator, the development that separates humans from rough beasts. It lets us know stuff we never thought of for ourselves. It lets us jump backwards and forwards in time. And it may allow its best practitioners to exhaust life's possibilities long before their bodies are used up. Want a long life? Do like me: Write short. Write shallow.