Monday, February 21, 2011

Today Would Have Been David Foster Wallace's 49th Birthday

Posted By on Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 3:49 PM

There isn't a modern author that means more to me than David Foster Wallace, so even seeing a reminder on Facebook this morning that today would have been his 49th birthday is still weird and disconcerting. I guess it's still a little strange to me that he's gone, but there's still a lot to appreciate in the work he left behind (and an unfinished novel to be released in April).

With his work, there's a lot I would consider among my "favorites", but the graduation speech he gave at Kenyon College (published in 2009 as This Is Water) is what sticks in my head:

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line — maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.

Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible — it just depends on what you want to consider. 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.

[WSJ]

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