Cycle Maggots

AUTHOR NARRATION

Hear the poem.

Read by the author in the original English.

Cycle MaggotsEnglish narration

TWO WAYS TO DESCRIBE RANDOMNESS

Markov and martingale

These two terms describe different properties of a random process: one concerns memory; the other, expectation.

MARKOV

The present is enough.

In a Markov process, once the present state is known, the path taken to reach it supplies no additional information about the future. The probabilities of the next state depend on now, not on the process’s entire history.

Formal definition: Markov process →

MARTINGALE

No predictable advantage.

A martingale models a fair game: even using all available information, the best prediction of the next value remains the current value. The outcome may rise or fall, but no average gain can be predicted.

Formal definition: martingale →

INFINITE JEST

That Infinite Gesture

The poem's phrase places an endless human motion beside one of the most famously expansive novels in contemporary American fiction.

Infinite Jest moves among a tennis academy, a residential addiction-recovery house, and a near-future culture consumed by its entertainments. Its many characters and intersecting timelines turn questions of pleasure, ambition, dependency, family, and connection into a deliberately nonlinear, encyclopedic novel.

Its reputation is split in a productive way: the novel is widely acclaimed, but also famously demanding. TIME named it one of its 100 best English-language novels published since 1923, while its scale, density, and constant digressions have made finishing it a recognizable reading challenge. Its 388 endnotes begin on page 983 and continue almost to the end, with some containing further notes of their own.

Explore the book on Google Books View it in Open Library Read TIME's assessment

The cloud-covered book jacket of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace — Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel. Cover image via Open Library.

The author flips through his own copy of Infinite Jest, showing the density of the novel and its endnotes.

A copy of Infinite Jest open to two densely printed pages of its endnotes — A single open spread from the nearly 100 pages of endnotes in Infinite Jest—a glimpse of just how dense the novel is.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The writer behind the infinite.

A writer whose work joins formal virtuosity, humor, loneliness, and a desire for genuine human connection.

19622008

David Foster Wallace became one of the most distinctive literary voices of his generation through his novels, short fiction, and essays. His writing joins an almost obsessive attention to systems and language with a sustained concern for addiction, isolation, attention, and the difficulty of reaching other people. Infinite Jest, published in 1996, remains his best-known work.

Wallace lived with severe clinical depression for decades. He died by suicide in 2008 at the age of forty-six. That reality informs how some readers encounter his work, but it cannot by itself explain or summarize either his life or his books.

2005 KENYON COLLEGE ADDRESSThis Is Water

Wallace’s celebrated speech about attention, empathy, and the freedom to choose how we perceive ordinary life.