Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle columnist, remembers author David Foster Wallace after his suicide at age 46.

I loved David Foster Wallace’s work and I was very sad to hear of his death. DFW was brilliant and he knew it. He skewered the absurdities of our society by being as complex as the ridiculous world we live in. And yet, as reported by Mr. Carroll, DFW understood that:

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

“That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”