the late david foster wallace

I am a bit late to the late David Foster Wallace, unfortunately. I have not spent much time with contemporary authors (not out of prejudice against contemporary authors, because the few that I have read -- DeLillo, Eggers, Wolfe, Roth -- I have enjoyed; my prejudice is against fiction in general, which I find somewhat less interesting than non-fiction. Hence I thoroughly enjoyed From Bauhaus to Our House but never really got into Bonfire of the Vanities.), but I have taken the time to read a few things by Wallace in the past week, and I would like to recommend some of those things.

First, there is this piece on lobsters in Gourmet magazine, which begins by explicating the history of lobster as food, veers into a discussion of the nature of tourism, and ends with a consideration of the ethics of eating lobster, which is written in a way that reveals Wallace's undergraduate education in analytical philosophy. I would quote a piece of it for you, as it is really excellent, but the pdf is a scan and so I would have to type out the text for you, and it is really hard to quote Wallace in less than a couple paragraphs, because his thoughts take a bit of time to unfold and usually contain more nuance than can be easily captured in a line or two. Much of the excitement is in how he gets to the end of a thought, anyways.

The second is this adaptation of a commencement address Wallace gave in 2005 to Kenyon College, which I can't endorse exactly but I do endorse whole-heartedly:

Because here's something else that's 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 an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible 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 own 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 plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.