Summary: We're trying to locate Aaron Swartz, a year after his death, as a landmark in the culture and the age. Swartz had commented after his arrest two years ago that he read Kafka differently: The Trial, he realized, was not fiction but meticulous documentary coverage. And nothing engages me more about Aaron Swartz than the news (to me, anyway) that he was an astute reader and commentator on David Foster Wallace and his mad epic Infinite Jest. On his blog Swartz had "solved" the mysterious ending of Wallace's novel. It is as if he were trying to deduce the algorithm in Wallace's head that produced the book. I am feeling tremors of a convergence here of iconic figures — two geniuses, two suicides and perhaps two parallel visions of an American apocalypse.
