on Sep 15th, 2008Monday Jam: Heartless Bastards - New Resolution
+ Other Things
David Foster Wallace is dead. The news came as I watching USC beat OSU 35-3. A pisser good end to a pisser good day as I always say.
What can you say? Suicide is a kind of occupational hazard for guys like him, and the world is poorer for his loss.
Brad shot me a quote from Wallace’s widely circulated 2005 graduation speech at Kenyon College:
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
When the world loses someone who can articulate thoughts like that we are poorer for it.
In the spirit of David Foster Wallace’s plea to try and be a little less selfish let’s listen to the Heartless Bastards: New Resolution