Sublime

There was already a well-known nature writer named David Rains Wallace, so Fred Hill, Nadell’s boss, who had once worked for Sierra Club Books, suggested he use his full name.

The layers of asserting and then hedging those assertions to assert slightly more emphatically and imaginatively that would constitute Wallace’s style are beginning to form.

Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.’

Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms.

I swear I am not exaggerating: this occasion is a real two-handed head-clutcher, awesome in its ickiness.

“Most of my own stuff I’ve been delivering to the wastebasket,” he wrote