Cruising

I've never sailed on a cruise; I've never even yearned for that experience.  By a cruise, you know what I mean.  One of those giant white hotels that head out to sea, filled with people having "fun."  By "cruise," I don't mean sailing along the Turkish coast with 12 or 13 fellow travelers in a "gulet"; I've done that and would joyously do it again.

I do confess to standing on the Elliot Bay dock, staring up at cruise ships that sail between Seattle and Alaska, watching the tourists board, and envying them as they step out onto their little balconies and look down on me -- both literally and metaphorically.  But then I look carefully at their faces, and decide -- nope, not for me.  Maybe when I'm older and more decrepit, and can't get around on my own?

Or maybe if someone (like Harper's magazine) paid all my expenses, and asked me only to write about my experiences.  Which is how David Foster Wallace found  himself boarding the m.v. Zenith (which he re-christens the "Nadir") at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in March 1994.  Did he have fun?  The title of his article was "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," so draw your own conclusions. 

The article -- the essay, as it appears in his collection of essays by the same name, may be an expanded version of the original article -- is Wallace at his satirical and grumpily depressed best.  Who are all these awful people, and are they really enjoying themselves? -- a basic question he asks himself throughout the essay.  The cruise does have its pleasant aspects, but more often (to him) its horrors -- as he makes clear from the first page:

I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue.  I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels.

An experience that is, to many, the high point of their lives, comes to fill him with existential dread:

I have felt as bleak as I've felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or just Me.

For seven days, Wallace wanders about the ship, listening in on conversations.  He eats meals in assigned seating.  He stays aboard during shore visits, because, he claims, he suffers from mild agoraphobia.  He uses room service, more and more frequently, to avoid assigned seating at meals.  He measures his room obsessively.  He suspects constant surveillance as the only way maids can clean his room so unobtrusively every time he's briefly absent.  Out of a sense of duty to his publisher, he spends one day participating in a number of organized activities, including skeet shooting and ping pong.  He is not amused.

Wallace is obsessed by the aging nature of -- other than himself -- the guests. 

Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the daytime Nadir were in various stages of disintegration.

He sees uninvited coercion in the brochures advertising the cruise, and inescapable coercion in his treatment on board.

The promise is not that you can experience great pleasure, but that you will.  That they'll make certain of it.  That they'll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can [ruin] your fun. ...  The ads promise that you will be able -- finally, for once -- truly to relax and have a good time, because you will have no choice but to have a good time.

This is a long essay, and Wallace has much to say about his day to day activities, discoveries, and avoidance of certain contacts with others.  But at its end, Wallace comes face to face with who he really is, and who he really is proves to be not much different from those about him.  The pampering by the crew, the insistence that he experience pleasure -- at first embarrassing and guilt-inducing -- soon becomes the new norm.  Over-indulgence of his every whim is no longer enough.

[T]he Infantile part of me is insatiable -- in fact its whole essence or dasein or whatever lies in its a priori insatiability.  In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the Insatiable Infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction.

By the end of the cruise, he is outraged by the bar's delay in serving him a Mr. Pibb:

and then you have to sign for it right there at the table, and they charge you -- and they don't even have Mr. Pibb; they foist Dr. Pepper on you with a maddeningly unapologetic shrug when any fool knows Dr. Pepper is no substitute for Mr. Pibb, and it's an absolute goddamned travesty, or at any rate extremely dissatisfying indeed.

As we by now appreciate, David Foster Wallace is a very funny writer, as well as an introspective writer, a perceptive writer, and, perhaps, a somewhat disturbed writer.

But we love him, and wish we were traveling with him.

Which is why news of his suicide fourteen years later is upsetting.  But not totally surprising.