September 1, 2009

Page 566


They have shifted into a sexual mode.  Her lids flutter; his close.  There's a concentrated tactile languor  She is left-handed.  It is not about consolation.  They start the thing with each other's buttons.  It is not about conquest or forced capture.  It is not about glands or instincts or the split second shiver and clench of leaving yourself; nor about love or about whose love you deep down desire, by whom you feel betrayed.  Not and never love, which kills what needs it.  It feels to the punter 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 moment he has her now has won her as if from someone or something else, something other than he, but that he has her and is what she sees and all she sees, that it is not conquest but surrender, that he is both offense and defense and she neither, nothing but this one second's love of her, of-her, spinning as it arcs his way, not his but her love, that he has it, this love (his shirt off now, in the mirror), that for one second she loves him too much to stand it, that she must (she feels) have him, must take him inside or else dissolve into worse than nothing; that all else is gone: that her sense of humor is gone, her petty griefs, triumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the death of pets- that there is now insider her a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O., O.  That he is the One.

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

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