The Irascible Appetite of Victory
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest . Wallace describes, rather plausibly (more so than, say, Camus' account of Don Juan in The Myth of Sisyphus ), the motivations for anonymous sex. The description comes in the midst of one of the character Orin Incandenza's many sexual encounters, which are always with women he names only as "the Subject", who are mostly young mothers: "It is not about consolation...It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about glands or instincts or the split-second shiver of leaving yourself; not about love or about whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never about love, which kills what needs it. It feels...rather to be about hope, an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject's fluttering face, a something the same that will propitiate hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to be assured that for a mome...