this post isn't really worthwhile, but it'll make me feel better about the annual expense this thing is costing me. and i can't even figure out how to change the font to be helvetica or verdana or something less cheesy than trebuchet.
hello world.
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October 28, 2008
November 04, 2007
tardy commencement speech
Since high school, I've been a follower of author David Foster Wallace, introduced to me as a "brilliant, young hot guy who wears bandannas" by my writing teacher. The bandannas are definitely part of the allure (renegade autodidact) along with his breathless footnotes which question already-sprawling hyper-aware observations and arguments, built into stories or essays that can be tiring, but fun, to read.
I came across a commencement speech he composed for a small liberal arts school. I read the speech prior to tonight, but only skimmed it as the generous person who transcribed the speech and posted it online, (however generously) neglected to make it pleasing to look at. But tonight, in a fit to read aloud for a while ( I have an obsession with reading my favorite authors to open spaces) I performed the entire speech twice. This resulted in a mildly sore throat currently being soothed by sliced frozen peaches.
Anyway, the speech did exactly what he intended: to slightly bring down the graduates' expectations of careless, successful adult life and present the un-fun frustrations and disappointments awaiting them in the years ahead. His point was not to dismantle their hope, but to be real, which is something I would have appreciated as a college student, even if I refused to concede to a future of monotony. Wallace describes the possession of (liberal arts) education not as a way of thinking, but a way of controlling your educated thinking. I can't really do it justice, so here is my favorite excerpt:
The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
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, bet 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.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're 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 he's right. I love this because, thankfully, he's telling me that irritations and disliking my current situation every once and while is completely normal. But the way to handle myself is to take my misery and transpose it into something that transcends loathing everyone because I'm being negatively affected. I can see how I've slipped into this thinking he testifies against; how I have taken myself and my expectations too seriously. Sometimes you just need to hear that.
