Sat 20 Sep 2008
David Foster Wallace on the liberal arts
Posted by Ronit under Advice to Undergraduates, In Memoriam
Posted at 10:24 pmFrom a commencement address given at Kenyon in 2005:
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.
34 Responses to “ David Foster Wallace on the liberal arts ”
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September 26th, 2008 at 12:08 am[...] gets at the argument started by Frank here. One of the perils of a Williams education is that you can never convincingly be one of those [...]
September 21st, 2008 at 3:29 am
Ronit,
Reading this post is so surreal to me…and here is why.
When I saw the news of this man’s death, I felt a little ‘ting’ of recognition. I scanned the list of his published work to see if the familiarity I felt was due to having read one of his books. However, I didn’t recognize the titles. Still, there was something familiar. I felt I knew him but wasn’t sure how.
Now, when I see your post, I remember. His address to Kenyon,
had been forwarded to me. I can’t remember why. It is very possible that it was one of those chain emails we all get, some of which are worthwhile, some of which are tiresome, depending on our mood, and the actual material. But this man’s work…what he had to say… stopped me in my tracks. I remember being awed by the message…at once so abstract, and yet so simple.
A few weeks ago, a man I know…the husband of a dear friend, was suddenly killed in a freak accident. Shortly thereafter, I was in conversation with the son, who had been away when it happened. He had received a message to get on a plane and come home. He knew something serious had occurred, but was unaware of the details. When he finally connected with a family member, he happened to be standing in a customs line, in a crowded airport. It was there, in that line, where he heard the news of his father’s death.
The gist of our conversation, (a testament in itself to the amazing spiritual consciousness of this young man), was that, being in that state, in those surroundings…those circumstances…made him realize that we cannot ever really know what another human may be dealing with at any given moment. That we must give the benefit of the doubt, be kind, forgiving, helpful…or as Wallace says..just be aware.
Thank you so much for this. What a timely reminder of a remarkable man, and what he had to teach us.
Rest in peace, David Foster Wallace. You will not be forgotten.
September 21st, 2008 at 4:11 am
All this stuff is geek-ville onanism. The real people in this world with other real people to see, places to go, things to do (you know, the ones walking on the street) don’t think about it (except on rare occasions when they consciously scorn it), don’t talk about it - they just flat ignore it. And of course they don’t use a word like “onanism” but some more expressive, earthy synonym for it.
September 21st, 2008 at 10:02 am
By “all this stuff”, Frank, what is it you find specifically ‘onanistic’?
Wallace’s work, his suicide, my post, my friend’s death, his son’s way of dealing with it? None of these people qualify as the “real people in the world” whose innermost thoughts you profess to know?
Please, I don’t really want to know your answer. And I only hope Wallace’s family doesn’t stumble upon your remark.
September 21st, 2008 at 10:08 am
The constant self-congratulation of liberal arts colleges & parents about “learning how to think” is “geek-ville onanism” (and I’ve always hated how superior it sounds), but I really don’t think the main message of that commencement speech is. I think it’s wonderful, and I’m sad about his death (missing his authorial persona, even) but glad this is passing around the internet at the moment.
September 21st, 2008 at 1:56 pm
the word Onanism was coined, meaning ejaculating outside the vagina, or masturbation (because this also spills semen, rather than using it for procreation).
It’s good to have frank hear to tell us what the real people think about and what they ignore; and what they would make of it if they didn’t ignore it.
September 21st, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Well, Onan in the Bible (and I spell that with a Capital) was kinda well-known for spilling his seed upon the ground. Which if you lived like a lot of folk did then in an agricultural community or even now in some place that’s still left that has actual farmers, spilling your seed upon the ground isn’t really such a good thing and seems kinda careless.
Minnesota was a real big agricultural state in the ’20’s when David Onan, after working in a Rambler dealership, came up with a pretty darn good generator and made some money out of it which beats spilling your seed on the ground any day. And he and some other guys started the Minneapolis Aquatennial in 1936 which featured a Water Ballet with some , for those days, pretty hot babes which brings us around to the Bible again.
If you need a generator, and who knows what with oil and all, you can still get one of Dave’s only I think it’s call a Cummins Onan.
September 21st, 2008 at 7:07 pm
The tragedy of his suicide is that he had been treated for major depression for about 20 years. His medication had not been as effective & he had been hospitalized at least twice during this year.
Knowing this, while reading the excerpt from his Kenyon commencement speech, makes his words very painful.
September 21st, 2008 at 7:49 pm
It is ironic that people who arrogantly and frequently have expressed their opinions on this board about war and peace, about monetary policy, about fiscal policy, about social policy can’t stand somebody else’s opinion about a little commencement address at Kenyon College.
September 21st, 2008 at 8:06 pm
And you in turn, Frank, seem to be having trouble accepting somebody else’s opinion of your opinion.
September 21st, 2008 at 8:41 pm
It’s a further manifestation of the good old fashioned, first class, hypocritical, despicable, irrevocably entrenched, frequently denied intolerance to be found unexceptionally in all of us Ephs.
September 21st, 2008 at 9:47 pm
I spoke imprecisely Frank. I have no comment on your opinion of DFW. I comment only on your assertion of what “The real people in this world” think of him (or more precisely, think of his ideas). I’m sorry about that.
September 21st, 2008 at 10:18 pm
From today’s NYTimes, another piece on David Foster Wallace, “The Best Mind of His Generation”….
…and for you Frank, another sample of his writing:
“A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice — the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game — as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.”
From “Federer as Religious Experience,” Play Magazine (Aug. 20, 2006)
September 21st, 2008 at 10:55 pm
DFW was an superb tennis player from ages 12 through 15 after which he turned his attention to other interests.
September 21st, 2008 at 11:37 pm
With respect to one sport, beginning in early childhood I have known, or become acquainted with the thoughts of, innumerable then currently or formerly practicing players, coaches and evaluators of all sorts at all levels, and not once have I known any of them to think poetically about their sport. Real people don’t do it - and real people don’t do it because they are of the belief that to do so nets them nothing.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:06 am
God bless, Frank. You are absolutely indispensable, and a good curmudgeon is hard to find.
I can’t wait to be dyspeptic and cynical, seeing clearly the innumerable vanities of life.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:21 am
frank - Perhaps your circle of sporting acquaintances is not wide enough. At least, with the sports with which I am most familiar, the number of actual, participating athletes who think of their craft in poetic or artistic terms is quite large. These sports, however, are all quite ‘foreign’ and ‘elitist’, so perhaps participants in said sports do not qualify as ‘real people’ under your rubric. I guess your statement might be true as long as we are careful to constrain the definition of ‘real people’ such that it excludes enormous sections of humanity.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:36 am
Am I reading you correctly, Frank… can you give us a little more about the real people and the other ones?
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:58 am
Thank you for your guidance and concern, unreal people - and, if any, real people.
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:55 am
frank, perhaps your definition of thinking “poetically” is too limited.
My jock brother who played football through college (until the second major knee injury, coupled with the former broken bones forced him out junior year) and he played baseball through high school. He LOVES his sports, and when speaking of them he definitely veers into the poetic at various points. No, he’d never write like DFW, but he certainly talked about playing and watching his sports (those would be real people, non-elitist sports I think) in a manner I would call poetic. My brother lives in a small town, has a regular guy job, and is a staunch Republican (aka the political opposite of my lefty self whose blue collar roots you seem to find insufficient).
Anyone who loves a sport and spends time with it veers into the poetic when describing that big play or how the team came from behind. The great players become mythic, the pass longer, the defenders larger, etc. I find it absurd, and frankly offensive, for anyone to claim that “real people” (what the hell do you mean by that, anyway?) can’t speak beautifully about what they love. Sports Illustrated has all kinds of poetic language, as does ESPN, etc. I didn’t say it was good poetry, but it is. You find the most hilarious metaphors about sports. The most vivid descriptions. What about that isn’t poetic?
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:45 am
Frank is just being silly. I mean really…per his remark, none of us are “real people” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) nor is Wallace, or his many fans.
Anyway, Wallace was a writer. Writers write. They make an effort to string words together in an evocative way. And I think it’s safe to say, that if they happen to have some experience with, or passion for, their chosen subject matter, then they have a better chance of pulling this off successfully.
How do you feel about beautiful sports photographs, Frank? Or terrific commentators? What percentage of those guys played a sport in their past?
September 22nd, 2008 at 10:12 am
Frank -
Even I think you are being stupid.
TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG
AE Houseman
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before the echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:01 am
For starters here are some of my basic rules for identifying real people: 1) Any person who reads this blog is rebuttably presumed to be unreal. And I would not even waste my time in an attempt to rebut the presumption as it pertains to me. 2) Any person who does not currently work for wages (as opposed to salary) or as a sole proprietor is rebuttably presumed to be unreal. 4) Any person who has never worked with his hands for pay is rebuttably presumed to be unreal (playing athletics is not deemed to be working with one’s hands). 3) Any person who has had any college education is rebuttably presumed to be unreal. 4) Any person who has never had a major disappointment in his life is rebuttably presumed to be unreal (failure to get a date for the prom is not deemed to be a major disappointment). 5) Any person who has never lived in housing where the roof leaks is rebuttably presumed to be unreal.
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:46 am
Nothing infuriates me more than when other purport to define explain or explicate who “real people” are or who lives in “the real world.” As soon as someone else is paying my rent and my car payment, as soon as someone else buys my groceries and finishes the article on my desk that is long overdue allowing me to move on to the other articles or books on my desk that I am tardy in working on, as soon as someone else takes over my responsibilities to go down to San Antonio this weekend to baptize the little boy who will soon be my godson, as soon as someone wrestles with my own (I’d like to think) poetic reflections on my own athletic past, as I am doing for an essay using John Ed Bradley’s very real and poetic “It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium” as a launching point, and as soon as someone can magically make this ache in my knees disapper I’ll care what they think about who is and who is not a “real person” while they simultaneously vulgarly reduce the thoughts of someone who some time back spoke pointedly about suicide and then later tragically took their own life. I’ll also then take seriously their creation of an absurd, indeed fucking idiotic (rebuttably fucking idiotic?), schema for who is in that “real world.”
dcat
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:05 pm
By your own definition you are presumed not to be a “real person” frank, so how can you be qualified to tell anyone else what is or is not real?
And I’m trying to be polite here, so I’ll save the profanity I’d like to fling at you for another day.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
My roof leaks. Thank god. Keeping it real.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:25 pm
The post was under the heading “In Memoriam”, Frank. I’d like to think that you somehow missed that before launching into a criticism of Wallace’s gorgeous, but sadly, prescient words.
I also don’t believe you read the entire piece, because if you had, you would have noted that his “advice” was all about leaving behind what you deem as ‘onanistic’. and embracing as “sacred”, that which you might qualify as “real”.
September 22nd, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Touchy, touchy.
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:41 pm
LOL.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Douchey, douchey.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Oh the irony of calling out another on their sensitivity and volatility. It must be a ‘real people’ thing. Which one bears the mark?
October 18th, 2008 at 3:32 am
Wallace published stories in the Amherst literary magazine. One was about depression and a tricyclic anti-anxiety medication he had been on for two months. The medication “made me feel like I was stoned and in hell,” he told me. The story dealt with the in-hell parts:
Rolling Stone, more
October 18th, 2008 at 11:56 am
nuts- thanks for the link to the excerpt from Rolling Stone (October 30, 2008). Btw, tricyclics are sedating. They’re the generation of anti-depressants that came just before Prozac & the other SSRIs.
October 18th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Nuts:
Ditto from me. I read the article last night and have been thinking about it since.
Wallace and what he suffered, should be a subject of discussion. Perhaps we can learn from him. I’m grateful to Ronit for the original post, as well as to you for your follow-up.
Also, I admire your tenacity in posting important news on other subjects that have recently been voted ‘not pertinent’ to Williams. I hope to pursue the weakness of that argument at some point.
BTW, I clicked on to WSO a few days ago. I don’t make a habit of visiting the student blog, but I was on the Williams website, and there was a link, and so I took a gander. Interesting that they deem as ‘Williams-worthy all manner of subjects, including a current discussion going on the subject of ‘depression’. Something tells me they also openly discuss this very historical election.