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I am surprised by how many articles or essays or blog posts I continue to come across on David Foster Wallace, and they seldom fail to intrigue, which is why I follow them, even though I have yet to read any of his works. You might say he is my favorite author of those I have not read.
This one is about his commencement speech that he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005, and which has been adapted into a book titled "This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life". Our writer du jour, Jeremy Lott, tees off on the angle that Wallace spoke about suicide in his speech, which was delivered only three years before he committed suicide himself.
_ _ _
It’s a morbid interest of mine to see what writerly suicides had to say about ending it before they ended it. “No I don’t have a gun,” sang Kurt Cobain, but it turns out he did.
In the Kenyon speech, Wallace speaks of suicide. It is hardly a coincidence, he said, that most “adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.” (Though when the time came, he personally reached for the noose.)
Wallace used suicide as a pivot, telling the students that the “real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone…”
He didn’t suggest religion as a remedy, but he came close, telling the crowd “there is actually no such thing as atheism” in a practical sense. “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
He nudged them further. “The compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles,” he said, “is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”
Exhibit A: “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.”
Exhibit B: “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.”
Exhibit C: “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.”
Exhibit D: “Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”
-- Jeremy Lott at Patheos.com
_ _ _
And sometimes it doesn't matter what you worship, I guess. Sometimes suicide is just physical, as life and living day to day just seems to hurt too much: A failure of brain chemistry, a kind of brain cancer that keeps the light out and the darkness in.
This one is about his commencement speech that he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005, and which has been adapted into a book titled "This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life". Our writer du jour, Jeremy Lott, tees off on the angle that Wallace spoke about suicide in his speech, which was delivered only three years before he committed suicide himself.
_ _ _
It’s a morbid interest of mine to see what writerly suicides had to say about ending it before they ended it. “No I don’t have a gun,” sang Kurt Cobain, but it turns out he did.
In the Kenyon speech, Wallace speaks of suicide. It is hardly a coincidence, he said, that most “adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.” (Though when the time came, he personally reached for the noose.)
Wallace used suicide as a pivot, telling the students that the “real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone…”
He didn’t suggest religion as a remedy, but he came close, telling the crowd “there is actually no such thing as atheism” in a practical sense. “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
He nudged them further. “The compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles,” he said, “is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”
Exhibit A: “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.”
Exhibit B: “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.”
Exhibit C: “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.”
Exhibit D: “Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”
-- Jeremy Lott at Patheos.com
_ _ _
And sometimes it doesn't matter what you worship, I guess. Sometimes suicide is just physical, as life and living day to day just seems to hurt too much: A failure of brain chemistry, a kind of brain cancer that keeps the light out and the darkness in.
