Today I Learned

That Lucy Maud Montgomery, who wrote the Anne of Green Gables books, also killed herself.

The writer's temperament is melancholy. The very sensitivity that drives you inward and makes you a good observer is a wretched tool for everyday life. It binds you up in chains of self-consciousness and gloom. You become shut off from the very life you're supposed to be writing about. It's dismal but true.

My post below about DFW has troubled me -- there's some careless writing in it that isn't worthy of its subject. DFW would never use "sizzlingly smart" -- he'd have found some much more tortured but accurate way to describe it; also "exuberant" -- I can't imagine him ever using the word exuberant, and if he saw it applied to his own prose, I'm sure he would have winced.

I wrote it in a hurry -- there are so many other things to say -- many others have said them very well on the web recently.