2 result(s) tagged “David Foster Wallace”

It’s been linked to plenty over the past few days, but David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address deserves to be read, in light of and in spite of his suicide:

“This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

“Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: In the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

Some marriages come with two microwave ovens or two sets of dishes. Ours did, too, but it also came with two copies of Infinite Jest.

This speaks less to our reading habits than our book-buying habits. I do not believe that Bride of Culture Snob has read David Foster Wallace’s doorstop from 1996. I didn’t get far enough to invoke the 69-page rule, which dictates that I must finish a book once I’ve gotten to that point.

So I won’t tell you — now that he’s killed himself at age 46 — that I devoured every word he wrote, or that I’ve memorized favorite passages, or that I’ve ranked my favorite Wallace foot/end notes. I’ve probably read a few of his short stories and a dozen or so essays. My favorite was probably his report from the set of Lost Highway, which seemed a perfect match of author and subject. (Wallace’s writing and insight are far more interesting to me than the movie itself.)

I don’t feel the cultural loss, even though I know it’s significant. I claim no personal connection with Wallace. I simply feel vaguely sad, and a little ill.

I remember feeling this way when I heard about the death of Elliott Smith and the disappearance of Spalding Gray — something like the retrospectively inevitable fulfillment of dread, with no surprise and a sense of societal failure. Yeah, we shoulda seen that one coming.