Thanks for all your comments last week — despite the fact that my question (“how the fuck are you people finding time to read?”) was fundamentally rhetorical, your descriptions of how you’re fitting Infinite Jest into your lives were fascinating. I am still behind, but thanks to a weekend spent back and forth from LAX to DEN combined with a few late nights using IJ to stave off the dread before my mother’s funeral, I got well past page 100, as well as my despair at ever catching up.
Funerals are funny things. I’ve found getting through them, or any difficult emotional event, without losing your shit requires a shift in attention. If I stayed in my head and let memories of my mother and all her kindnesses take over my thoughts, the result was miserable weeping. If instead I stayed in the present — fussy baby being soothed by his grandmother, vaguely sexy tortured Christ over the altar, my brother saying things about my mother that were absolutely untrue — I found that (a) I wasn’t horrified to be in church, and (b) I could fully participate in the moment.
Here’s a small portion of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005.
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- 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, day in and day out.
He goes on the describe a trip to the grocery store after a long day at work — the sort of adult experience most college graduates don’t include in their glossy visions of the future — as an exercise in choices. You can stand in line, tired, starving, and frustrated as shit, and wonder why all these ridiculous, bovine jerks are standing between you and a hot meal at home, or you can remember that everyone has their own heroic battles to fight, and cut them some slack.
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. You get to decide what to worship . . .
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, clichés, 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.
The more I read of this guy, the more I like him, and the sorrier I am that he’s dead.
The Kenyon speech was the reference I used when I posted news of his death to MetaFilter last year. (Link.) The sudden outpouring of grief in that thread is remarkable to read, even now.
That MetaFilter thread is a memorial in itself.
I’ve been passing the Kenyon speech around to just about anyone who will listen for some time…it’s an eloquent wake up call. I hadn’t seen this MetaFilter thread before,though. Reading through it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Thanks for posting that.
more footnotes, please 😉
That speech is very nice. I feel almost lucky to have never read any DFW before starting IJ. I get to read all this great stuff for the first time.
It is hailing and thundering miraculously right now outside my window in Vermont.
2 days ago a good friend of mine was murdered for no apparent reason.
I am on page 627 of Infinite Jest and it has truly been a treat reading these posts everyday.
This stuff is real. It helps, and it is truly beautiful to see people’s legacy live on in positive ways like this.
Great post.
Yes, that Kenyon Speech is great; and insofar as it kinda alludes, vaguely, to an attitude that Hamlet expresses in the play Hamlet, it also sheds some light on the Hamlet parallels in IJ.
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
Cf. Hamlet: … there is nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so.
There is a whole lot in IJ on how to think about things, especially later on. I think (I have decided, that is, to see this as meaningful) this is pretty key for the whole novel.
wow…kinda chilling to read his thoughts on adult suicides knowing what happened to him
[…] immediately after saving a draft of this post, I went and read the latest post over at Infinite Summer and discovered that Eden had excerpted from the same part of […]
I’m very sorry to hear that you lost your mother. Mine died many years ago but your description of attending the funeral reminds me very much of the sensations I had when my father died in 2004. That was when I began telling myself, “we’re all doing the best we can” and was able to not let the petty annoyances get to me. Re: the DFW speech, my new mantra is “this is water”. Take care of yourself.
Very sorry to hear about your mother. Wonderful post, though. Thank you.
Thank you so much for those quotes and for this post. This speaks to me so much right now. I can’t even explain how much.
I’m sorry to hear about your mother’s death.
In my experience, losing the person who loved me completely was the hardest thing but the family also went to an absolute fever pitch of craziness. I’m not speaking for you–just that I hope that didn’t happen and the various incidents were isolated ones.
I’m glad you could be in the moment.
I was a little drunk the other night, admittedly, but I had a good, spontaneous cry over DFW’s elimination of his own map.
My condolences for your mother’s loss. Your post speaks to me, as well, however, in terms of how I, too, have connected with DFW’s writing and ideas on a very practical level. In reality, despite all of the hype surrounding Infinite Jest for its supposed linguistic flourish and density, DFW was an author very concerned with practicality. That is, much of his body of work seems preoccupied with imparting a sort of road map (pun intended viz. all the “map” stuff in IJ) for living our lives more mindfully, and, therefore (hopefully), more rewardingly – or, at the very least, with more dignity. This is, indeed, difficult stuff to speak about in the retrospective shadow of his suicide, but his death, I think, does not make those ideas any less resonant.
The relevance of the daily, the banal, the minutia is what I find so interesting in IJ thus far. Viewing/reading this world in the first 200+ pages and trusting that all these little pieces will be explained ( like all these questions we have about cartidges, tps, eschaton, quebec…) and then being filled in on the details later is such a rewarding experience. And aside from what I think are some boring(although necessary) pages about the Boston AA scene, all of these little things Hal learns, processes, experiences, teach us about the whole- the ultimate world writ large.
I hate to say it but at about page 260 I am getting bored. Not frustrated, just bored. All these little tidbits just aren’t doing it for me – it seems like a lot of talk about nothing. Or a lot of talk about the obvious – but then there is that line that freaking blows you away. Is that enough? Just wondering if I’m alone. Lots of talking about dope and addiction – the veil is sort of obvious – but then he does take it quite a way – including it in the “Material” or dope paraphernalia. But – come on – let’s get moving! I’m so impatient.
Get moving to where? The end? The good part?
Not to be campy or a hippie-ish, but it may help to think of John Lennon’s suggestion that “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” as you read DFW. You are in the good parts, there is no reason to get moving to something else. Try to feel the characters a bit and they start to grow on you.
Also, I think the seemingly annoying details are there because sometimes life has a lot of details.
I hope this helps. I’d hate to see you drop out at pg. 260.
Nope – not dropping out. I stopped and had decided to go over some of my notes and make some posts. Get a grip, feel the pain, and re-group. You know, hungy, angry, lonely and tired. That’s me most of the time. I’m DFW’s book personified I think. But I guess we all are – and I think too much anyway. That’s what everbody and I mean everybody tells me.
Posting helps.
Eden,
My heart goes out to you and my thoughts are with you.
Whenever crazy, complex, interesting things are going on in the world, I always wish I could read a DFW essay about the subject to help me understand or better communicate it. He just has this way of expressing things and finding the hidden truths. I would have loved to read his take on the election last year, the economic stuff, even Michael Jackson. I miss him.
I’m very sorry for your loss. And grateful that your shift in attention included bringing the Kenyon speech back into the Infinite Summer conversation in such an immediate and personal way. (And for making me laugh in the midst of this seemingly endless insomniac night:”…vaguely sexy tortured Christ over the altar”…!?!)
It seems that we often find tragedy and comedy intimately conjoined in the cultural artifacts which resonate most powerfully. For a small gem of an example see Lorrie Moore’s short story “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk”. Or see just about anything by Nabokov.The most heart wrenching, keening sob can be remarkably similar physically to the deepest kind of intense, visceral laughter.And under the right circumstances, they can transition one into the other in a heartbeat. DFW is funny as hell, as well as being a skillful chronicler of the most vivid human tragedies. In fact, he comes right out and articulates one of the overarching tragicomic themes in IJ on p84, in the context of Mario and Schtitt’s converstaion about the nature of the “true opponent” in tennis. “…You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.” Fortunately comic relief is on the very next page as we are introduced to Tiny Ewell, and his struggle w/ the limits of addiction in a detox joint called “Happy Slippers” 🙂
Oh yeah…also from P84 : “Schtitt’s thrust, and his one great irresistible attraction in the eye’s of Mario’s late father: The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself.”
We should be able to tie this all together w/ Himself and The Entertainment…and the worship of said Entertainment…??
I know and love the Kenyon speech, but until you brought it up I hadn’t considered the strong echoes between its “You get to decide what to worship” portion and Marathe’s rant (p. 107) about “Our attachments are our temple, what we worship… Choose your attachments carefully.” Both arrive at roughly the same place, that the thing worth worshipping must be a universal good, something larger than the self. (I suspect there are more interesting observations to be drawn from the *differences* between the passages, if anyone wants to take a crack at it.)
Thank you for the comment.
I keep thinking about DFW’s questioning of postmodernism, and about him in relation to both the literature related aspects of the term and the postmodern concept in general, especially after seeing the video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsziSppMUS4 ) where he speaks of being interested in “using postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends”. Sometimes I wonder what do his works and interviews reveal to us about his world view – the postmodern, traditional or beyond postmodern aspects of it, and how these influences intertwine to combine his own personal “map”…
This is however an issue I intend to keep in mind and try to explore in the future.
P.S. And thank you, Eden, for your moving and interesting post. Best wishes.
I gave a copy of the Kenyon commencement speech to my therapist. She’s already using “default setting” in her daily jargon. When your therapist adopts DFW, it’s just another sign of his briliance.The best part of reading IJ is rereading earlier DFW works; I even dug out my old Harper’s essay on language–a fantastic read.
I just, as in just five minutes ago, finished a visit with a patient in which I referred to my “default setting.” And then I read your comment. But then, DFW has been permeating my life for years.
Thank you for letting me revisit DFW’s Kenyon College speech. When I stand in those grocery lines, I sometimes just feel like I’m a just nonentity being concerned and worried about other nonentities. To hear of a master spirit of the age like DFW struggling with this, with trying to keep consciousness from being a disease, gives me a much needed boost.
But sometimes I wonder if he cared too much, and this was bad for him in the end. And if he erroneously thought he was “long dead” before he “pulled the trigger,” that he thought of a suicide wish in itself as an indication that he was not fit to live anymore and set into motion a thought process around how he could never be a whole human being again. Whatever he did think, after reading more to confirm 100 times over what I already knew about him being so brilliant, it had to have been ineluctable and rigid beyond any of his powers or the knowledge of his prior accomplishments, and yes, record as an extremely empathic and compassionate human being, to reverse or erase it.
It is a form of heroism that you keep reading and writing and raising your children even though you just lost someone that you loved very much.
The Kenyon commencement address was my first exposure to DFW, so I was also quick to pick on some of the same themes in the conversation between Steeply and Marathe. I can’t help feeling somewhat haunted by Steeply’s response on p. 108: “What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love?….”
I am sorry for the loss of your Mom. I lost both my parents and my oldest sister and it doesn’t get easier, just weirder. I have used the commencement address so many times and it really has come in handy during funeral services, especially Catholic ones. Thanks for your post.