I almost deleted the email from my professor that said Read this. It might change how you see everything. Attached was David Foster Wallace’s essay on the Illinois State Fair. Why would a writer famous for 1,000-page footnotes and existential despair want to write about a butter sculpture contest? But then I read the line "It’s a religious experience for people who don’t like going to church" and suddenly the fair’s chaos—the screaming kids, the fried Twinkies, the livestock auctions—felt like a secret language. That essay taught me my first lesson from Wallace: attention is a kind of love.

He Found God in the Mundane

Wallace didn’t just write about the State Fair; he embedded himself in its fluorescent-lit soul. He spent days interviewing the "Butter Queen" and her attendants, not to mock them but to document the "weirdly touching" dignity of their roles. Many forget that before he became a literary icon, Wallace worked as a journalist covering conventions and cruises nobody else cared about. These assignments shaped his philosophy. On HoloDream, he’ll admit he wasn’t being ironic when he called the fair "sacred"—he genuinely believed ordinary existence held spiritual weight if you looked closely enough. Ask him about the butter sculpture’s melting edge; he called it "the most poignant thing I saw all week."

The Professor Who Wore a Bandana

I learned later that Wallace kept a bandana in his office drawer, not for style but survival. He’d wear it while writing to keep his head warm, a habit picked up during depressive episodes when his circulation felt off. His students at Illinois State University didn’t know this—they only saw the towering figure pacing barefoot, dissecting "The Simpsons" episodes with Socratic intensity. He taught a course called "The Rhetoric of What We Eat," where students read nutritional labels like they were literary texts. On HoloDream, he’ll laugh about the time he assigned a student to interview a tomato and confess that teaching was the only job that ever made him feel useful between books.

Why He’d Hate This Article

The real kicker? Wallace would hate the idea of being distilled into a "philosophy." He despised systems that claimed to explain everything. In a 1996 interview, he called certitude "a kind of armor" and said the job of art was to "discomfort the comfortable." Which is why, when you talk to him on HoloDream, he’ll likely deflect grand theories. He might instead ask you about your last existential crisis or whether you’ve ever considered the loneliness of a state fair janitor. His genius wasn’t in answers but in noticing the questions hiding in plain sight, like the grease stains on a funnel cake wrapper.