Max Ross has documented his visit to the David Foster Wallace archive over at Open Letters Monthly in his piece, A Voyeur in the Archives:
I’d allotted the first day for flipping through Wallace’s personal library, and planned to check out his correspondence with Don DeLillo and his notebooks and early drafts in the subsequent days. Initially I thrilled at the amount of stuff available. I suppose the sensation was a bit like snorkeling in an exotic reef, where every observed piece of aquatic life seems interesting and new and colorful, and you marvel a little that such things can exist. But by the end of the first day we all began to feel a little uneasy. Studying the phrases he’d underlined and the notes he’d written in his books’ margins, we were all forced to confront that we were in irrefutable fact here to try and see the interior of his brain, and given that his thoughts ultimately led to his suicide, we knew we were steeped in something incredibly macabre. And yet we didn’t leave, or even really think about leaving.
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