A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Honestly, I was not at all prepared to read this essay. I had just finished reading another essay by the same author, an impassioned piece about the subtlety of Franz Kafka’s literary achievements that, frankly, was outside my interests. Naturally, even though he was the author of “This Is Water,” I couldn’t help feeling indifferent toward his other writing. On top of that, this piece, “A Supposedly Fun Thing…,” runs a full 170 pages, and the dense footnotes must have made up a good fifth of its total length. So as I sat down to read it, my posture resembled someone bracing for a solemn intellectual challenge.

But the guard I had raised so high came down completely just a few pages into the reading. This piece, a recounting of his experience on a luxury cruise, was extraordinarily honest. His honesty is so unsparing, so strict even with himself, that he candidly confesses the impossibility of his own attempt to observe the cruise from a third-person perspective. As a result, he holds nothing back in expressing his views even on the indulgences that a luxury cruise is supposed to offer. The idleness, the managed pleasures, and the contentment that this cruise provides are like a kind of hypnosis, one that ultimately makes you forget that all of it is an illusion. And of course, the illusion and the hypnosis do not end with the cruise he experienced. It begins with one thing but extends to everything.

Having written it out this way, you might feel that this long essay is full of cold cynicism. To address one needless worry: that is not the case at all. The graceful sentences, which never waste a single breath, and the eccentric powers of observation grip the reader’s heart and shake it. What I mean is, it’s fun. It’s the subtlety that sentences can achieve. I have always wanted to write like this.

David Foster Wallace. 2018. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Translated by Kim Myung-nam. Bada Publishing.