GÊNIOS QUE TERMINAM SUA JORNADA NO LUGAR ERRADO

Semana passada foram anunciados os vencedores do 2009 National Magazine Awards. Leia aqui a lista completa de vencedores. Mas uma reportagem particularmente me chamou a atenção. "The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace", publicada pela Rolling Stone americana, foi a vencedora na categoria perfil. O texto fala sobre o escritor David Foster Wallace (foto acima). Ele se enforcou em casa, no final de 2008, aos 46 anos. O pouco que li de Wallace - o livro de ensaios "Consider the Lobster" - gostei muito. E dizem que nem mesmo é o melhor da obra dele. O texto é humano, divertido, sarcástico e traz uma avalanche de informações. Qualidades que celebrizaram os trabalhos do autor. Abaixo, os dois primeiros parágrafos da reportagem da Rolling Stone resumem bem Wallace.

He was six-feet-two, and on a good day he weighed 200 pounds. He wore granny glasses with a head scarf, points knotted at the back, a look that was both pirate-like and housewife-ish. He always wore his hair long. He had dark eyes, soft voice, caveman chin, a lovely, peak-lipped mouth that was his best feature. He walked with an ex-athlete's saunter, a roll from the heels, as if anything physical was a pleasure. David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." He wanted to write "stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live." Readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style: his comedy, his brilliance, his humaneness.

His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California's Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.

No vídeo, Jim Morrison, do The Doors, cantando Touch Me. Outro gênio versátil que terminou sua jornada de maneira chocante.