natural sounds

All the appreciations and memorials for David Foster Wallace have me feeling a little melancholic. I was never a big fan of his writing, although I always sort of knew I should be. (Or is that “should have been?” RIP.)

The New York Times article mentions horrible things like a 20-year battle and ECT. The Morning News led me to a commencement address to the fine class of 2005 at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

The speech starts with a good joke, like all good commencement addresses do, as Wallace, himself, says (he keeps a running commentary on his adherence to the form while never really deviating from it). It’s worth reading from start to finish because the points build slowly and end up coming to quite a wonderful head in the end. It goes a bit of way toward explaining what he was grappling with himself. I’ve touched upon these themes too.

Two points the grabbed me in particular.

The entire speech rolls around that old adage that a liberal arts education “teaches you how to think.”

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

This point made me think of a piece I edited last May about Richard Nixon’s 1968 address where he first started talking about “The Silent Center,” which later became the “The Silent Majority,” Nixon’s (and the Republicans’) shorthand for the “ordinary Americans” who were feeling the radicals in America had gone too far.

In the piece, Richard Whalen, who first coined the term “The Silent Center,” was reflecting back on his time in the Nixon campaign and, later, the White House.

I was one of the small group of men around Nixon who wrote his speeches, gave him a steady stream of memos, ideas, phrases. At that point, there were three of us writing speeches: Ray Price, who was a very graceful liberal Republican; Pat Buchanan, who was a somewhat more pugnacious, very conservative Republican; and me, who is a sort of moderate conservative centrist.

Nixon referred to us as his bright young, men. When we were 33, we knew everything — and now that I’m 72, almost 73, I don’t think I know anything. But I never met a more confident group of people than the young people who organized around this veteran, battered loser and made him president.

It’s what I was thinking about when I wrote about the crisis of the mid-30s just a couple months ago. Wallace talks about it as choosing to believe you’re NOT the center of the universe. According to Richard Whalen, it sure is a lot easier to get stuff done when you think you are.

The second point from the commencement address worth repeating here:

[I]n 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. … If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough…. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly…. 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… 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.

I feel this happening to me all the time. And it’s what I meant when I wrote about Sigur Ros and Radiohead last week. The constant reminder of what’s possible. Ways to choose to live. Wallace’s point is to be ever mindful that those choices are there. And that it’s not enough just to know about them. We have to make them. Over and over and over again.