David Foster Wallace accurately portrays the experience of the intellectual in beginning stages of recovery. He obviously has some experience with both being an intellectual and going through addiction recovery. “It’s the newcomers with some education that are the worst… They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head.” – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Back Bay Books, 1997), 272. Those of us who have developed for years as creatures of the intellect have perhaps succeeded in becoming more purely intellectual in our daily being than we realize. That there may be requirements of us that are Simple But Not Easy may then come as a rude surprise and a significant challenge to the ego, where this ego, our brainy ways, has been our primary social armor.
Wallace obviously knows something about the intellectual life. Though he places this point among things learned in an inpatient recovery program, it is something well-known to the intellectual: “[t]hat concentrating intently on anything is very hard work” (p. 203); and similarly, “[t]hat it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds” (p. 204). But, for us intellectuals, because a significant portion of our selves is centered in the intellect, and because this appears to be a key center of the disease of addiction, “… it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people” (p. 203).
Those of us who have lived to think of ourselves as smarter than most others will in recovery be forced to confront also this fact, “[t]hat no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that” (p. 201). (This goes double for anyone regularly teaching Socrates’ theory of wisdom.) Fortunately, and again much to our chagrin, there is a lot of help available to us in an AA program or at a treatment center, provided that we are able first to recognize our need for it. It is likely, there, that we will learn “[t]hat you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it” (p. 202), and “[t]hat it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person” (p. 204). We must hope that once we learn “[t]hat it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak” (p. 204), we can then summon that courage to accept our disease-ridden condition and to begin to recover.
It is important finally to learn that what seem to be trite and superficial clichés – such as learning to live One Day at a Time and to avoid, for us, the especial danger of Paralysis by Analysis – it is important to learn that these are in fact deep and crucial truths. It is a particularly galling but vital assault on the intellectual ego to find that these mangy idiots by whom we’re surrounded may have learned this and learned it well before we did. Don Gately is a low-life thief and addict turned live-in counselor and Geoffrey Day is a recently-arrived client, a sociology instructor at a lower-tier college:
You just have to Ask For Help and like Turn It Over, the loss and pain, to Keep Coming, show up, pray, Ask For Help. Gately rubs his eye. Simple advice like this does seem like a lot of cliché’s – Day’s right about how it seems. Yes, and if Geoffrey Day keeps on steering by the way things seem to him then he’s a dead man for sure. Gately’s already watched dozens come through here and leave early and go back Out There and then go to jail or die. If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes to the front office at night to scream that he can’t take it anymore and clutch at Gately’s pantcuff and blubber and beg for help at any cost, Gately’ll get to tell Day the thing is that the clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live by instead of just say. – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Back Bay Books, 1997), 273.
Happily, once we do accept this fact, we find that it is indeed possible to be reborn into a life of fruitfulness and joy.
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