Capital T Truth, David Foster Wallace

I came to read David Foster Wallace after his death - actually because of his death. My introduction to him was through the April 18,2011 New Yorker article by Jonathan Franzen about DFW's suicide. They were great friends. The suicide broke Franzen's heart. I was moved by the article, and found a couple of short stories by DFW on the Internet which moved me further to read Infinite Jest. Can you believe it? I read the entire 1000 page book in the three weeks allotted by my local library. (I have since purchase a copy of it.) What a writer, what a thinker. And as I discovered tonight, what a speaker.

Here are a few memorable quotations from the phenomenal 2005 commencement address he gave at Kenyon College. This version was transcribed and published by The Economist.

 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".

In this address, he has been slowly, logically making his points, and by the time the above conclusion is reached, it hits with a force rather than as a cliche. This next paragraph follows in sequence - there's a jaw dropper in it.

 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. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

 The address ends with the following:

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.  

He called this "The capital-T Truth: life BEFORE death". The address is not long and contains many profound ideas. It's worth a read.

A side note: Franzen claims that with his suicide, DFW was shooting not the "master", but those who loved him (family and friends) because he was incapable of accepting their gifts of love. He had capacity to give infinite love, but not to accept it. Franzen's article is long, but also is worth a read.