"Not to mention once when in a burst of absurd half-drunken freshman hubris he'd accepted a massive assignment that involved auditing a Russian Existential an Absurdist Literature class and writing the papers for a wealthy and tormented son of a Rhode Island State Supreme Court justice who was actually enrolled in the class and discovering that not only all the reading and critical background but the seminar itself was actually held in Russian, which David Wallace did not know or speak one garbled syllable of, and had to sit there with an enormous rigid grin, transcribing the phonetic version of whatever unearthly and incredibly rapid sounds were being made by everyone else in the room every Tuesday and Thursday from 9.00 to 10.30 for three weeks before he was able to think of a plausible excuse and backed out of the arrangement... The point is that is this what David Wallace did in these situations, which was to assume and hold by main force an enormous grin that he imagined communicated ease and confident familiarity with whatever was going on but in fact, unbeknownst to him, in its rigid dissension and lack of eye-involvement together with the skin situation, actually looked like the agonized rictus of someone having the skin of his face slowly turned off..."
David Forster Wallace, The Pale King, p.446
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