"So, I'd actually like to hear larger feedback about this concept about the neon idea. I'll try to spell it out as clearly as I can: So, neon tubes, like beer signs, are filled with gas and they have lights at the ends of the tube which end up illuminating the whole coil. So if we are thinking about short story writers like Flannery O'Connor, or Joyce, or O Henry, there is a sensation in reading those stories where you get to the end and the whole thing is cast in a different light. In this way, the short story is all about build which climaxes in the 'light that illuminates everything else'. Okay? So, then, we can think about why Wallace would bring himself, or a character of himself, into the end of this story. It casts the whole first section in a 'different light' right? I know, that's very cute. Lights, neon. Okay."
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This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc.—and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
- David Foster Wallace, Good Old Neon
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The voltage across a discharge tube will accelerate a free electron up to some maximum kinetic energy. The voltage must be large enough so that this energy is more than that required to "ionize" the atom. An ionized atom has had an electron plucked out of an orbital to make it a "free" particle, and the atom it leaves behind has become a positively charged ion.
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but essentially it's just gas that gets excited and emits light, right? just a load of hot air
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did so much, shone so bright
jus a hollow tube
tryna carry the light
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