Each morning you wake up wondering how hung-over you will be. You are partially asleep or partially drunk or both and at first you cannot gauge your own suffering and you cast a hand outward and ask yourself, how does this hand feel? What about the arm, the shoulder, the chest, the torso? Is there any aching or discomfort in the legs? On a pain scale of one to ten (one is a finger-flick to your skull, ten is death) what is the rating from the neck up? You blink your eyes to test their sensitivity to light and crane your neck to crack your spine and gravity is pushing on your swollen, dehydrated brain and you inspect your body for wounds or tenderness. You are you own doctor, sympathetic but ultimately disconnected.

David Wallace was doing the other main compensatory thing he did when he was in a room where everyone seemed to understand exactly what was being talked about but him—which had happened in certain social situations at Philo High […] Not to mention once when in a burst of absurd half-drunken freshman hubris he’d accepted a massive assignment that involved auditing a Russian Existential and Absurdist Literature class and writing the papers for a wealthy and tormented son of a Rhode Island State Supreme Court justice who was actually enrolled in the class and discovering that not only all the reading and critical background but the seminar itself was actually held in Russian, which David Wallace did not know or speak one garbled syllable of, and had to sit there with an enormous rigid grin, transcribing the phonetic versions of whatever unearthly and incredibly rapid sounds were being made by everyone else in the room every Tuesday and Thursday from 9:00 to 10:30 for three weeks before he was able to think of a plausible excuse and backed out of the arrangement. Leaving the client—who was still enrolled—with his own very special sort of existential dilemma. The point is that this is what David Wallace did in these situations, which was to assume and hold by main force an enormous grin that he imagined communicated ease and confident familiarity with whatever was going on but in fact, unbeknownst to him, in its rigid distension and lack of eye-involvement, together with the skin situation, actually looked like the agonized rictus of someone having the skin of his face slowly torn off, which luckily for him all the room’s GS-13 Immersive Exam transfers and CTO shelter specialists were too serious and intent and engaged with the anti-shelter protocols […] to notice in anything more than a peripherally uncomfortable way, as well as David Wallace’s youth, corduroy suit (which was the IRS equivalent of a Speedo and floppy clown shoes), and absence of hat.

Vous vivez dans un enfer de merde, je le sais, et je vous en plains du fond de mon coeur. Mais de 5 heures du soir à 10 heures du matin tout votre temps peut être consacré à la muse, laquelle est encore la meilleure garce. Voyons ! mon cher bonhomme, relevez le nez ! A quoi sert de recreuser sa tristesse ? Il faut se poser vis-à-vis de soi-même en homme fort, c’est le moyen de le devenir. Un peu plus d’orgueil, saprelotte ! Ce qui vous manque, ce sont “les principes”. On a beau dire, il en faut ; reste à savoir lesquels. Pour un artiste, il n’y en a qu’un : tout sacrifier à l’Art. La vie doit être considérée par lui comme un moyen, rien de plus, et la première personne dont il doit se foutre, c’est lui-même.

You’ve established a wonderful thing here with Hitler. you created it, you nurtured it, you made it your own. nobody on the faculty of any college or university in thus part of the country can so much as utter the word Hitler without a nod in your direction, literally or metaphorically. this is the center, the unquestioned source. He is now your Hitler, Gladney’s Hitler. it must be deeply satisfying for you. the college is internationally known as a result of Hitler studies. it has an identity, a sense of achievement. You’ve involved an entire system around this figure, a structure with countless subcultures and interrelated fields of study, a history within history. I marvel at the effort. it was masterful, shrewd and stunningly preemptive. it’s what I want to do with Elvis.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.

A mesure que grandissaient sa puissance et sa gloire, mon imagination renforçait la sévérité du châtiment que je voulais lui infliger. Ainsi, au début, me serais-je satisfait d’une défaite électorale, d’un refroidissement de l’enthousiasme populaire. Par la suite, je commençai d’exiger son emprisonnement ; plus tard encore, son exil dans quelque île lointaine, plate, à l’unique palmier, qui, tel un astérique noir, renvoie au tréfonds d’un enfer éternel, pétri de solitude, de disgrâce et d’impuissance. Maintenant enfin, rien, sinon sa mort, ne pourrait me satisfaire.

Mania was a mental state every bit as dangerous as depression. At first, however, it felt like a rush of euphoria. You were completely captivating, completely charming; everybody loved you. […] But at some point things began to turn. His mind felt as if it was fizzing over. Words became other words inside his head, like patterns in a kaleidoscope. He kept making puns. No one understood what he was talking about. He became angry, irritable. Now, when he looked at people, who’d been laughing at his jokes an hour earlier, he saw that they were worried, concerned for him. And so he ran off into the night, or day, or night, and found other people to be with, so that the mad party might continue.
Like a drunk on a bender, Leonard had a blackout afterward. He woke up next to Lola Lopez in a state of utter collapse. Lola managed to get him up, however. She led him by the arm to Heatlh Services, telling him not to worry, to hold on to her, that he’d be all right.
It seemed especially cruel, then, three days later, in the hospital, when the doctor came into the room to tell Leonard that he suffered from something that would never go away, something that could only be “managed”, as if managing, for an eighteen-year-old looking out on life, could be any life at all.