Thompson addresses Wallace's markings in his copy of Tolstoy's What Is Art? that highlight a passage in which Tolstoy says: "but [art] is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity."3l Thompson writes that this represents what Wallace sought to bring about in his own culture as a way to counteract its "solipsism and loneliness" through art. [...]