David Foster Wallace on Life and Work
Adapted from a commencement speech given by
David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. Mr.
Wallace, 46, died last Friday, after apparently committing suicide.
There are these two young fish swimming
along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who
nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two
young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over
at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
If
at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as
the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please
don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish
story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are
often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an
English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -- but the
fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal
platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like
hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
A huge
percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is,
it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter
wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything
in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the
absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important
person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic
self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty
much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting,
hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no
experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The
world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind
you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or
whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated
to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real -- you
get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach
to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called
"virtues." This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of my
choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my
natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally
self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of
self.
People who can adjust their
natural default-setting this way are often described as being "well
adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphal academic setting
here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our
default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question
gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education,
at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to
over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my
head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in
front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure
you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and
attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside
your own head. 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.
That may sound like
hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact
is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in,
day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult
American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such
part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and
older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
“
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.
”
By way of example, let's say it's an
average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job,
and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day
you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home
and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then
hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all
again. But then you remember there's no food at home -- you haven't had
time to shop this week, because of your challenging job -- and so now
after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket.
It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to
the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get
there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time
of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some
grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and
infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much
the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly
out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded
aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky
cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of
course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey
people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit
your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and
eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it
turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the
end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is
stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic
lady working the register.
Anyway, you
finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and
wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get
told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death,
and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries
in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to
load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall
out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then
you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive
rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.
The point is that petty, frustrating
crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because
the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time
to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think
and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every
time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the
certainty that situations like this are really all about me,
about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and
it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way,
and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most
of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they
seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that
people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and
look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and
I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind
because of all these stupid g-d- people.
Or,
of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my
default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam
being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's
and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish,
forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the
patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest,
most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most
inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell
phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet
ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's
children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably
screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we
all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...
Look,
if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that
thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have
to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's
the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring,
frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the
automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that
my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's
priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to
think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these
vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of
these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past
and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but
ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to
drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a
father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and
he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more
legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that
everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and
frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much
harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
Again,
please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying
you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just
automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental
effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or
you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough
to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this
fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in
the checkout line -- maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been
up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of
bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor
Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a
nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic
kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not
impossible -- it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're
automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is
really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting --
then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless
and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay
attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually
be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow,
consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire
with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the
sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's
necessarily true: 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.
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.
I know that this stuff
probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it
is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical
bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish.
But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon.
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. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of
what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us,
that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water,
this is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
