U.S. novelist, essayist and short-story writer David Foster Wallace, who died Sept 12, 2008. (Steve Liss/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

By about 3 p.m. Sunday, at least 10 of my friends had changed their Facebook status to reflect their reaction to the shocking death of writer David Foster Wallace. I was no different: “Jason McBride is mourning DFW.” Many of my FB friends are writers of one kind or another, and they — we — took it hard. It was an out-of-the-blue, heart-stopping kick in the head.

Wallace had often written about depression and addiction and, in interviews, had alluded to his own experiences with both. He was also considered one of the best, most talented, most ambitious writers of his generation. As with most suicides, the irrationality of the act is impossible to comprehend, but if someone so smart, so accomplished, couldn’t somehow talk himself out of it, what help is there for the rest of us? According to his father, Wallace had been suffering “severe depression” for several months and had been recently hospitalized. It’s a horrible loss — of life and inspiration.

DFW wasn’t my favourite writer and his narrative voice could be grating — it was all that vertiginous self-consciousness. But I was awed by his ambition, his work ethic and, indeed, the genius of much of his oeuvre. Another genius, Dennis Cooper, claimed Wallace wrote the best sentences in contemporary American literature, and on many occasions, I agreed. Few authors produced such consistently fine, original writing in both fiction and non-fiction. Infinite Jest was a particular touchstone: It was a hilarious, harrowing, 1,000-page exploration of the perils of professional sports, the emotional and physical dimensions of addiction, the nature of terrorism and the potential (both good and bad) of entertainment. Famously festooned with footnotes and otherwise dense with digressions, Infinite Jest was also, in one grand sense, about the terrible difficulty of communicating.

(Back Bay Books) The internet is currently blossoming with eulogies. Watching this clip on the New York Times site — in which Wallace extemporizes on his inability to speak Italian — I was reminded of the first and only time I saw him. While touring with Infinite Jest in the mid-’90s, he appeared in Toronto at Harbourfront’s reading series. The Toronto media and literary community were there in force. I was working the event for a local book chain, and once he finished his reading, I carried a stack of Infinite Jests — a stack being about four — over to the card table where he was signing books for fans. Wearing his trademark bandanna, he was chewing tobacco and spitting into an empty Diet Coke can in between autographs. (Our abortive attempt at chit-chat — not worth relating here — made it clear that he was uncomfortable with literary stardom.) DFW read from Infinite Jest and his notorious Harper's Magazine article “Shipping Out,” about his dispiriting time spent on a Caribbean cruise, which had been published in much longer form in his non-fiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. He was manic, droll, twitchy, self-deprecating.

The scope of his self-deprecation — and tortured self-awareness — can be seen in a 2005 commencement address he gave at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. In this blunt, conflicted yet oddly moving speech, DFW eschews the inspirational platitudes and banalities that characterize the form and tries instead to leave the audience of graduating seniors with a nugget or two of practical, hard-won wisdom.

There’s a telling passage toward the middle of the speech:

Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." It's not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Now, of course, these words are fraught with terrible significance. Thankfully, he left behind thousands of other words — several big, brainy books' worth, in fact — that are equally empathetic, beautiful and true.

Jason McBride writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.