I’ve been reading many of the David Foster Wallace tributes these last few days. I can’t get enough. The Internet is the biggest enabler of all time.

In addition to being an amazing writer, Wallace was apparently an incredibly dedicated teacher and a really sweet guy.

Here are some tributes that have particularly moved me.

A Life Divided:

He was my teacher, at Amherst, in the fall of 1987. …

DFW was about 25. He had long hair and always came to class with a tennis racket and sometimes cookies. He had us take breaks so he could smoke. We loved him. …

I used to confuse “further” and “farther,” and, apparently, I did it quite often. In one of my stories, I’d confused them yet again, and in the margins, he’d written, simply, “I hate you.” I’ve never confused them since.

Random NY Times commenter:

I taught DFW at Amherst and count him the best student I’ve ever had. …

He wrote two senior theses at Amherst. A creative thesis in English that was his first novel, “The Broom of the System,” and a philosophy thesis on fatalism. Both were judged to be Summa Cum Laude theses. The opinion of those who looked at the philosophy thesis was that it, too, with just a few tweaks to flesh out the scholarly apparatus, was a publishable piece of creative philosophy investigating the interplay between time and modality in original ways.

That much is probably common knowledge. Here’s what is not so widely known: Though theses normally take a whole school year to write, DFW had complete drafts of his theses by Christmas, and they were finished by spring break. He spent the last quarter of his senior year reading, commenting on, and generally improving the theses of all his friends and acquaintances. It was a great year for theses at Amherst.

CC2K:

DFW always seemed several cognitive steps ahead of everyone else working out there—and several steps ahead of me. Much of his stuff just made you shake your head in wonder that anybody’s mental metabolism was speeding fast enough to capture all that he did. …

The really deep and important and amazing thing… DFW did was he helped me come to grips with the noise in my own head, the never-ending eruptions and eruptions out of eruptions of self-consciousness.