David Foster Wallace: Commencement of consciousness

David Foster Wallace (by Kauserali)

Although David Foster Wallace may not have fully embraced his own wisdom (he died of apparent suicide approximately three years after imparting it to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College), his words continue to resonate with those still treading the path of “life before death.”

Wallace, the son of an Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy (his father, James D. Wallace) and an award-winning Professor of English (his mother, Sally F. Wallace), had his own long list of accomplishments.  Having graduated summa cum laude from

Amherst College with a double major in philosophy and English (the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree – a cliché he would probably have avoided), Wallace went on to author such lauded works as The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest.  His long-term struggle with depression is well-known; what’s not so well-known is his long-term allegiance to church.  In an article titled The Ferocious Morality of David Foster Wallace, David Masciotra explained, “Wallace was a member of a church at every place that he lived, but he rarely wrote about his faith or discussed it.”   

What Wallace did very openly discuss in his 2005 commencement address was his conviction that “there is actually no such thing as atheism.”  Just as we are “hard-wired” for self-centeredness, we are also hard-wired for worship.  According to Wallace, it’s not a question of whether we will worship, but rather a question of what we will worship.  Some worship “money and things,” others their “own body and beauty and sexual allure…”  Trouble is, these types of worship will “eat you alive” – whereas worshipping “some

sort of God or spiritual-type thing” might give you a fighting chance (oops, another cliché).

So what is it about worshipping false idols that keeps us coming back for more and more?  Wallace attributes this tendency not to sin or evil, but rather to our all-too-human “default settings.”  He describes these “unconscious” habits of worship as the kind “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 antidote?  According to Wallace, the path to consciousness “involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”    

Resources

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/139756-the-ferocious-morality-of-david-foster-wallace/P1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace

Copyright June 28, 2012 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved