Pleasure and beauty so total they verge on the unbearable — the near-fatal ecstasy that Infinite Jest literalizes in…
echoes
From: All That
- Early text: The narrator's fits of ecstasy are "sometimes so much
so that it was almost too intense for me", triggered by sunlight that "achieved
moments of immanence and became the color of beaten gold"; the war-movie's
sacrificial death he "regarded as not only “heroic” but also beautiful in a way
that was almost too intense to bear". [one-paragraph story]
- IJ echo: The Entertainment — the cartridge whose pleasure is literally fatal,
reducing its viewer to inert bliss (the medical attaché settling in before the
unlabeled cartridge, scene 007, pp. 33-37; the viewers reported out of
commission altogether, scene 029, pp. 87-92).
- Weight: shared-preoccupation