I heard about David Foster Wallace on NPR yesterday. What a
guy! I then read his commencement speech at Kenyon College
(This is water) and was blown away by the clarity with which
he put things. I'll read him more but in case I forget
here's an extract from that speech. [Speaking of speeches, I
like Charlie Munger's USC talk, too.]
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, cliches,
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.
And the following just reminds me of grandma:
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.
