I didn’t realize Wallace had died.  Killed himself yet.  Here’s a quote from an interview:

….there is this existential loneliness in the the real world.  I don’t know what you’re thinking or what it’s like inside you, and you don’t know what it’s like inside me.  In fiction, I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way….There’s a kind of ah-ha!  Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do.  It doesn’t happen all the time.  It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes.  I feel un-alone – intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.  I feel human and un-alone and that I’m in a deep significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and in poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.