Logical validity is not a guarantee of truth

He remembered his last failed attempt to get sober and how he was no longer writing and asked himself what he had to lose. He came to understand that the key this time was modesty. “My best thinking got me here” was a recovery adage that hit home, or, as he translated it in “Infinite Jest,” “logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.” He knew it was imperative to abandon the sense of himself as the smartest person in the room, a person too smart to be like one of the people in the room, because he was one of the people in the room. “I try hard to listen and do what [they say],” he wrote Rich C., “I’m trying to do it easy … this time,” not “get an A+…. I just don’t have enough gas right now to do anything fast or well. I’m trying to accept this.”

Not that things came easily. The simple aphorisms of the program seemed ridiculous to him. And if he objected to them, someone inevitably told him to do what was in front of him to do, driving him even crazier. He was astonished to find people talking about “a higher power” without any evidence beyond their wish that there were one. They got down on their knees and said the Thankfulness prayer. Wallace tried once at Granada House, he told Costello, but it felt hypocritical. (All the same, Wallace liked to quote one of the veteran recovery members, the group known in “Infinite Jest” as “the crocodiles,” who told him, “It’s not about whether or not you believe, asshole, it’s about getting down and asking.”).

D.T. Max
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
Viking Penguin, New York 2012