I really enjoyed the work of the novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace. I read a lot of his writing, to the point where his sentences seemed almost self-parody -- and yet, I understood them thoroughly. I understood the value of looking so closely at the minutiae of everyday life and letting it roll slowly off the tongue, off the typewriter. The short-story collection The Girl with Curious Hair amazed me when I read it, as if a whole new form of writing was now possible. And while reading Infinite Jest I went to a place beyond amazed. I felt like I was listening to someone's 9th Symphony, but only through one channel, because my brain wasn't properly set up to grasp the complexity and poetry on display.
So, anyway, he died, at his own hand, the result of many years of holding the possiblility at arm's length through powerful medications. After reading many remembrances of both his brilliance and his generosity, I have even more respect for him, and a sense of the deep loss felt by his family and circle of close friends.
All of which I say only to provide some context for reading his commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, which is really worth your time. Its subject is the value of a liberal arts education once you leave college and face the frustrations of everyday interactions, but it ends up as a sort of minor manifesto for living life with attention, love, and compassion.
If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.
I can't say it better than this, but I'll add (thanks to my three-hour lunch conversation today with Ty) that it's this inability to see the world through others' eyes, to gather some sense of what life is like outside of your own head, to even care about these alternate realities -- this inability to see and incuriosity about seeing seems to be a hallmark of conservative politics. I feel these folks have heartfelt ideals and aren't solely operating from greed or righteousness. They truly think their actions will lead to a better life for all. But their idealistic blinders don't allow them to see how wrong they are, and how they hurt so many.
Though I've read DFW's speech a few times before, it was only a week ago I came across it again, and it resonated for me more deeply than before. I try to make my way through the world in the way that he describes, but as he says, it's unimaginably hard.
