Crossing Paths with David Foster Wallace

My Serendipitous and Sometimes Very Brief Encounters with Some of the Most Influential Philosophers of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

I had been invited to give a colloquium talk at Claremont Graduate University (which, when I was a student there, was called The Claremont Graduate School). Patricia Easton, my dissertation advisor, and I had kept loosely in touch over the years, and she remained interested in my research.

I was working on a book idea, which would eventually see print: Matter Matters: Metaphysics and Methodology in the Early Modern Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). But I was in the throes of clarifying the idea, and Patricia was kind enough to invite me to CGU to run some of it by faculty and grad students.

The department put me in the Double Tree by Hilton, on Foothill, which, if I’m recalling this right, used to be the old Griswold’s. It was February, and having just come from Pennsylvania, Claremont, which is in sunny Southern California, was a welcomed reprieve from the harsh northeast winter.

I was going to meet Patricia at her office about 10am. Grabbing a Some Crust coffee and an almond croissant was on my list of things to do before that. I was on east coast time, and so getting up early according to Pacific coast time was easy peasy. I walked to Some Crust from the hotel, noting how warm and sunny it was. Even so, just knowing of the gloomy, bitter wet cold of the east coast that I had just left behind haunted me the entire walk. Would I really have to return to that?

After Some Crust, I walked to the philosophy department and found Patricia in her office. The talk was scheduled for 2pm, I recall, in a seminar room that the philosophy department now used—I think that it had moved from the house on College to a house on 10th. A house next door was where the seminar room was located. Though as I now recollect this, I recall the seminar room for this particular visit being in the house on College. My memories of my many visits to Claremont seem to have been forge welded, and it is difficult to sort out the details.

As Patricia and I caught up and gossiped, a young student came to the door. Patricia had asked her to assist me while I was in town. She was working on her dissertation, which intersected with some things I had published, and Patricia had asked me to spend some time with the doctoral student to see what I thought of the idea. The student would make sure that I had lunch and all that before the talk, and was invested with the department’s VISA to cover any costs.

I recall having done the same as a graduate student when visitors came to Claremont. It was a rite of passage, I guess, to now be the recipient of such attention.

The student and I discussed the main of her dissertation idea. I recall that she was from the Middle East, that she and her partner were living in Irvine, and that she had some concerns about the fate of the doctoral program, for there had been rumors of its possible demise. I told her that those rumors were around when I was a student.

The department would in fact be gutted and trashed some years later.

Ugh.

Lunch and coffee was enjoyable. The temperature had risen into the 70s. A cool breeze countered the warmth of the sun. This was the feel of my childhood, of my adolescence, of my UC Irvine days. Would I really have to return to the east coast? The answer to that question haunted me.

The seminar room was surprisingly active. Lots of folks around the seminar table. I knew several. At the opposite end of the long table, to my right, sat a young guy wearing a cream colored bandana. He wore it like a biker or maybe like a blacksmith, on his head. He wore round wire spectacles. It appeared that he had gone a day or two without a shave.

The room was filled with graduate students. Several attendees were former graduate student friends of mine who had been lucky enough to remain in Southern California. Chief among them was Jack Call, the now famous philosopher of psychedelics and religion. He was a philosophy faculty member at Citrus College. Like me, he is now retired.

I believe that the talk was about a connection I saw between Hobbes and Kant. That, I think, brought out scholars such as Michael Green, who is a serious Hobbes scholar. I recall that he was with a colleague of his, also at Pomona College, one of the Claremont Colleges, who was an up-and-coming Kant scholar, having studied, if I’m recalling this correctly, with Henry Allison. But as I try to recall this, I find myself wondering whether I am again confusing (putting together) several talks. This particular talk may have happened before my interest in Hobbes, and was about Descartes and his theory of enumeration. Not sure.

Whichever talk it was, what stands out is the guy with the bandana.

He took copious notes—at least that was what it looked like. He rarely looked up. Every time I looked his way, he was scribbling notes.

During the long discussion that followed my reading of the paper, he said nothing. Just scribbled.

At the end of the colloquium talk, I asked Chuck Young about the guy with the bandana.

“What’s his story?” I asked.

“That’s David Wallace. He’s in the English department at Pomona,” he said.

English? I wondered. Why would someone from the English department be interested in anything I had to say?

He packed up his notebook, stood, he looked my way, at which time we briefly locked eyes, he nodded and smiled, as though thanking me for the talk, and left the seminar room.

Why would he wear that bandana? I wondered. Odd, I thought.

Years later I would see a picture of him, wearing that bandana, the occasion being news of his death. He was David Foster Wallace. His encyclopedic novel, Infinite Jest, was now all the rage. I was a big watcher of the Charlie Rose show, and had apparently missed his interview with Wallace. I have since seen it on YouTube. I had no idea. Had I known of his work, or who he was, I would have made a beeline to him after the talk. But the encounter was a nod and a smile.

To this day, I wonder what he had been busily writing in that notebook.