[Archive] I'm Never Going to Finish Reading Infinite Jest

The year is 2157. I’m sitting in a room with a book in my hand. No, the room is the book. If you look closely, you can make out the slight imprint of the faded words “Infinite Jest” lining the walls, miniscule page numbers spanning the contents like hieroglyphs. We turn our attention to the rest of the “room”. On the ceiling is emptiness: there is no light, or any hope of one. In the corner lie my other books, covered with a thick layer of dust. I desperately reach for my copy of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, grasping at anything that can bring me comfort. Maybe Nakata can lead me out of this place, to the entrance stone and into an alternate reality. Actually, at this point, I would even be OK with Johnny Walker. I brush off the layer of dust, only to reveal another layer of dust. I open the book— it’s all dust. “Unimportant.” David Foster Wallace is staring at me from the ceiling. Of course, I should have known. I take my Sailor 1911 and dip it in the ink from the pages of the room, and use it to erase the middle third of the floor. We are on the 141st iteration of the Cantor Ternary set, and I have made a total of $2^{141}-1$ deletions, which follows from a quick proof by induction.

Of course, I am already dead, along with all my descendants, their descendants, and their descendants, all the way down to the $10^{38}$th generation. As you can probably tell by now, the year is not 2157. All $e^{e^{87.5}\ln{(2)}}$ of my descendants are cursing me for the day I decided to pick up a copy of Infinite Jest because I heard that David Foster Wallace structured it like the Sierpinski Gasket and included a two-page footnote on the MVT. I reach for the pen— there is no pen. David Foster Wallace is looking into my soul, which is quite easy to do since my body has long since disintegrated away. I too, look into my soul, and see a fine print lightly embroidered along the edges. “Infinite Jest”, it reads. Once again, David Foster Wallace reminds me that there is no hope. As I turn of a page of the wall, a small television in the corner of the ceiling flickers and updates. The television is watching my every move. “40%”, it reads. I resign myself to my fate and erase another third of the floor.