Trust math in the locker room — "Only that at times like this…"
‘… Only that at times like this, when you’re directionless in a dark wood, trust to the abstract deductive. When driven to your knees, kneel and revere the double S. Leap like a knight of faith into the arms of Peano, Leibniz, Hilbert, L’Hôpital. You will be lifted up. Fourier, Gauss, LaPlace, Rickey. Borne up. Never let fall. Wiener, Reimann, Frege, Green.’
Context
The sermon's peroration (the opening ‘… is DFW's — Pemulis resuming over locker-room commotion, seconds before the news that Wayne is melting down on-air). "Directionless in a dark wood" is Dante's selva oscura — the condition of having no map at all — and Pemulis's cure is not a better map of the territory but a Kierkegaardian leap out of territory entirely, into the arms of the mathematicians. Cartography of self at its limit: when the self can't be mapped, revere the integral sign. ("Reimann" and "Rickey" as written.)