Life & Wisdom Quote by David Foster Wallace

Wallace loads a lot into that slippery verb: are. Not “were,” not “will be,” not even “feel.” Are. The line is a small act of resistance against the default settings he spent his career mapping: distraction, irony-as-armor, the narcotic hum of entertainment, the easy drift into being a consumer instead of a person. “The other half” implies a missing first half - likely the technical half, the craft half, the cleverness half. He’s conceding that skill matters, but he’s also warning that virtuosity alone is spiritually inert. The real job, the second half, is to dramatize humanness in the present tense.

“Dramatize” is the tell. He isn’t asking art to preach or therapy-talk its way to sincerity; he wants it staged, embodied, made unavoidable. Drama creates stakes. It forces attention. In Wallace’s moral universe, attention is the rarest commodity and the most ethical one: what you choose to notice shapes what you become. So the sentence is also an argument about form. If the culture trains us to skim, to snark, to keep emotional distance, then art has to build structures that re-teach presence.

The hedging at the end - “Or can be” - is the bleakest, most honest part. Wallace doesn’t romanticize “human” as a stable condition. It’s a capacity under siege, something we lapse out of. The line lands as both credo and plea: yes, we’re here, now; no, it’s not guaranteed; make it real anyway.