It’s amazing, isn’t it? Three days after pitching in stickball, my adopted hometown game, I’ll be walking down the hallway, and my left arm will be swinging back and forth, and my right arm will stay at my side, motionless. It’s the only time that I actually notice what I’m doing with my arms when I walk — unless I’m carrying a large box — and it’s like the right arm has a mind of its own that says, “Sorry, not going anywhere today.” The arm is swollen, but doesn’t hurt in the sense that we traditionally expect things to hurt. I can forget that I’m in pain until I do something like walk, or try to reach above my head, and my fractured body won’t be able to do it properly, and then I remember. You’re not supposed to throw a tennis ball at a wall 150 times, and if you do so, you’d better win the game, at least. If you don’t win — as I didn’t — there’s both the sadness of losing and the knowledge that you may have experienced this proud type of pain for the last time, and once both your arms start swinging regularly again, it might be permanent.

This didn’t start out as a tribute to David Foster Wallace — for I am, despite having completed Infinite Jest (it’s my guess that no one merely “reads” it, or I merely want, like no doubt most others, some karmic credit for having read it besides the infinite hole it opens in the roof of your mind), not quite the right person for such a thing — but he does describe the phenomenon of having a “tennis arm,” or some such term, in the book. That is: one arm will be considerably larger than the other, having been subjected to an unnatural number of athletic processes over a long period of time. Wallace is dead, and the way to remember him is not just to read his works but to live our lives in a way that avoids the pitfalls he was unable to navigate: to live in awe of his considerable talents is a better thing than to live with his unshakeable sadness of, it seems, the human everything. Inasmuch as the tortured writer is not an idealist’s MacGuffin, let’s acknowledge that to be tortured is nothing but that, and there is no bright spot to it.

So really, this is an exegesis on pain, and the different kinds of pain, and how one lives through it. I enjoy the pain of stickball because it is so precisely connected with something I love to do, but often in the moderation of the pain, I can switch from resigned athlete to masochist. To over-medicate, as I will often do through booze and marijuana, is to create a new type of pain: the pain of being lost. We must have faith that the natural processes will play themselves out, that the body will heal itself, and trust these natural processes will do their job. In Infinite Jest, Hal Incandenza, the story’s protagonist, embarks on a quest to ingest the “super-potent DMZ,” a drug of such toxicity that it renders all other drugs worthless in its wake. Simultaneously, there is a videotape of such extraordinary powers that it has roughly the same opiate-like effect, and the tape shares its name with the title of the book. There are also textual explorations of the effects of other drugs and their effects, but the point is clear: entertainment and drugs, should there be a distinction between the two, both converge at some invisible vanishing point, and there is a tendency to move inexorably toward that point. Such explains, or is a result of, Wallace’s obsession with the concept of infinity, which he historically and mathematically explored in a 2004 book titled Infinity. It is the only other Wallace book I have completed, and it is clear that the infinite — the vanishing point — was a concept too huge for him to escape. I, too, have been fascinated by the infinite, but the writing of Borges, in its clever and fascinatingly efficient ruminations of the subject, have held my attention better than Wallace, who was clearly uneasy with the subject. Put simply, Wallace seemed uneasy about everything, and it made me uneasy, and it was a doubly uneasy thing to think about, even if it was ultimately rewarding and fascinating. To read Infinite Jest was not an entirely pleasurable experience, and involves enduring bouts of psychic, self-enforced pain — as if Wallace knew his own writing was, in a way, an opiate, and one for which he was sorry he created, but it was his only way to express his unease with the very process he was creating. Those who have read the first 22 pages of Infinite Jest have probably read enough. To make it through the footnotes around page 100 is a sign of a serious commitment, and to plug on through page 300 shows that one is really trying to finish. Make it to 500 and it shows that you are willing to be somewhat tortured to actually complete it, with its fits and spurts of digressions and footnotes, and you will probably succeed on both counts.

When I finished, almost 10 years ago at this point if not exactly 10 years, the feeling of its conclusion (so to speak) left me both intellectually bolstered and crippled for years. It was a stunning achievement but one that subtracted as much as it added, and one that would take a long time, using natural processes, to recover from. It’s a lot like the way I feel right now, with one arm swinging vigorously and the other arm staying perfectly still as I walk. The two halves will come together eventually, but it will take time. It took me two years or so to read another book and not resent that it was not Infinite Jest, but I got there. Part of it was that I was young, but another part of it was that Wallace had done exactly what he wanted to. He made me look into the abyss and waved from below. He probably even smiled from down there. It’s what he gave us, and what he knew he was giving us. He showed us what we weren’t, and what he was, by showing us that we weren’t what he was, and that we could fix ourselves even if he could not. It’s incredibly sad to think about, but hopefully we will heal, and move on.

David Foster Wallace’s other books include a novel, “The Broom of the System,” and his short story collections, “Girl with Curious Hair,” “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” and “Oblivion.” He also released several works of nonfiction including “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Consider the Lobster.” Wallace won raves a couple of years ago for an essay he wrote about tennis champion Roger Federer for The New York Times’ PLAY magazine. Read it here.