I was recently frustrated at the frustrating Beverly Hills Library searching frustratedly for some books that frustratingly weren't available. After previous trips there, looking in vain for a specific book, I this time had come armed with a list of no fewer than ten books that I hoped to locate and read. One of said books was David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, which--shock of shocks--they did not have available. After declining to pay the fee to have them hold it for me, I browsed the catalog to see which of his books they did in fact have for check-out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, of the eight books or so that could potentially have been available, exactly one wasn't checked out.
I sought this lonesome book out, only to discover that it was an adaptation of the commencement speech that Wallace gave to Kenyon College in 2005. This immediately rang a bell with me as my friend, Colin, had once told me that he had read the speech online and found it worthwhile, poignant, observant, and so on. Despite that recommendation, it had slipped my mind until now and I jumped at the chance to finally take it in.
I read the graduation speech--it was of reasonable graduation speech length--and was very taken with the original, distinct message Wallace seeks to convey to the Kenyon class of 2005. From the speech:
"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."
I'm not sure how clear this is as a solitary quote, so if you want to understand it better, the full address is here.
Much of this speech, I feel, is simultaneously about the mindset of a writer--though the two mindsets (intelligent college grad v. writer) are of course not mutually exclusive. Wallace articulates the potential to find worth everywhere in the world, just as every experience and every person can be observed and used as inspiration and written about. This connection fails to encompass all of what he is saying in that writers must inherently make judgments about these observations--is the situation dramatic enough? This character interesting enough? Instead, his proposed view is only that of a human being, one who looks at other human beings from the center of his or her universe. For me to paraphrase the eloquent way he describes this quest would be to do it a disservice. Again, read the whole thing.
This entry was originally going to be just about trying to apply this idea to real life--something I will certainly try to do--but then I remembered that Wallace died by committing suicide. Which makes the following lines from the speech all the more vivid:
"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."
And...
"None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head."
Now, like most all of these posts, I'm not the first person to talk about the prophetic nature of this speech, but maybe I'm the first person you've heard talk about it. So...
1. How does this change the effectiveness of this speech? How does it change the way that someone--let's say me--should take this advice? It had been my plan to try and reread this often, to refocus myself, but it seems strange to talk advice about being happy from someone who was clinically depressed to the point of suicide...OR, does that mean that he is, in fact, the best person to take advice from? Someone who is naturally happy knows nothing of how to be happy, they only are what they are, without effort. Wallace, a profoundly unhappy person apparently, would seem to know far more about the methods and approaches of finding happiness, even if ultimately he couldn't win that battle.
2. Was Wallace, as he says, "dead before [he] pulled the trigger"? Wallace didn't literally pull a trigger, instead hanging himself, and didn't make it to 50. Did he always know he was destined to kill himself? Were these methods he employed only a way to prolong the inevitable? Perhaps he felt/knew that he was a great thinker and writer with much to offer the world and that he owed it to those outside of himself (the ones he mentions so often in his speech) to generate as much as possible for those people to enjoy and digest. This was the only commencement speech he ever gave, which may be an illuminating detail in that he only needed to get this message out once and that he was not concerned with the money or prestige that being a graduation speaker brings. I wonder if he looked out on the unsuspecting, hopeful faces of the class when he read these lines about death and felt that he was in on a great secret, that he was actually one of the people that failed to live by these very words and that he would be dead long before they even understood the monotony he spoke of.
I was happy to have had Bill Nye* usher me from the collegiate to "real" world, but I can't say the Science Guy offered this kind of rumination on living life.
* On a lighter but related note, props to my friend Raffi for being the only person in a group of over 1000 supposedly smart graduates to have the idea/guts to walk over and shake Bill's hand after receiving his diploma.
More on DFW after I manage to get my hands on a copy of Consider the Lobster or Oblivion.
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