There are some writers that abound with such eloquence and insight that their best "work" is
sometimes not their published works, but something as simple as a letter to a friend.
I would like to share my three favorites. The David Foster Wallace speech is extremely long, but it is
one of my most beloved collection of words and so worth the read! Also, you may laugh at the cheesy
sky photo I attached to this post, I was lacking muses/musings/whatever (heh eh hem) and now I will leave it to
the experts...
1. Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005
Written and Delivered by David Foster Wallace
(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to.
In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].)
["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way,
who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and
then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish
stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre,
but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is
to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely
that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day
to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to
suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's
meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material
payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliche in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal
arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think.
If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim
that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good
seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliche
turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to
get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think
about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing,
I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value
of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan
wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of
God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like
I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God
and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost
and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out
'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the
bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all,
here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to
come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two
totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two
different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere
in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false
or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs
come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys.
As if a person's most basic orientation toward the
world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically
absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal,
intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy
is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer
for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too.
They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is
exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment
so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean.
To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties.
Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong
and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own
immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid
and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's
so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our
boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of.
The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or
YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own
are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called
virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting
free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and
interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are
often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default
setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an
academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in
abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention
to what is 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 (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation,
I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche 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 cliche about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a
terrible master.
This, like many cliches, 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.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit 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. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete.
The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means.
There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches.
One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging,
white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired
and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then
hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember
there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after
work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt
to be: very bad.
So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the
supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try
to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate
pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander
all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky
cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this
is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough
check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is
stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is
overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a
prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to
"Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy,
plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way
out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow,
heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because
the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious
decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to
shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About
MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody
else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how
stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that
people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair
this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the
end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup
trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic
or religious bumper- stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the
ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly
selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how
our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate,
and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks,
and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be
so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way
that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of
adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my
immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations.
In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people
in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist
has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that
just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and
he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually
I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is
just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful
lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way,
or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are
like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat,
dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this.
Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer.
Or maybe this
very lady is the low- wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a
horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is
likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that
you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider
possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable.
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within
your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on
fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how
you're gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted.
You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: 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 the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it
JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable 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 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 grieve you. On one level, we all know this
stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story.
The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to
your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the
verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful,
it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship 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 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 and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. 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.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech
is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties
stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just
some finger- wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy
questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do
with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the
time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water." "This is water."
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 cliche turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.
And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.
2. 1958 letter to his son on love
John Steinbeck
New York
November 10, 1958
Dear Thom:
We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.
First -- if you are in love -- that's a good thing -- that's about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don't let anyone make it small or light to you.
Second -- There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you -- of kindness and consideration and respect -- not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn't know you had.
You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply -- of course it isn't puppy love.
But I don't think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone.
What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it -- and that I can tell you.
Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.
The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.
If you love someone -- there is no possible harm in saying so -- only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.
Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.
It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another -- but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.
Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I'm glad you have it.
We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.
And don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens -- The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
Love,
Fa
3. Letter to Leo Lerman, turning down a profile in Harper's Bazaar
Anias Nin
Dear Leo
[…]
I see myself and my life each day differently. What can I say? The facts lie.
I have been Don Quixote, always creating a world of my own. I am all the women in the novels,
yet still another not in the novels. It took me more than sixty diary volumes until now to tell
about my life. Like Oscar Wilde I put only my art into my work and my genius into my life.
My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations.
I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles.
I weep when I find others play them for me.
My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.
I create a myth and a legend, a lie, a fairy tale, a magical world, and one that collapses every day
and makes me feel like going the way of Virginia Woolf. I have tried to be not neurotic, not romantic,
not destructive, but may be all of these in disguises.
It is impossible to make my portrait because of my mobility. I am not photogenic because of my mobility.
Peace, serenity, and integration are unknown to me. My familiar climate is anxiety. I write as I breathe,
naturally, flowingly, spontaneously, out of an overflow, not as a substitute for life. I am more interested
in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living
than in writing. More interested in becoming a work of art than in creating one.
I am more interesting than
what I write. I am gifted in relationship above all things. I have no confidence in myself and great
confidence in others. I need love more than food. I stumble and make errors, and often want to die.
When I look most transparent is probably when I have just come out of the fire. I walk into the fire
always, and come out more alive. All of which is not for Harper’s Bazaar.
I think life tragic, not comic, because I have no detachment. I have been guilty of idealization, guilty of
everything except detachment. I am guilty of fabricating a world in which I can live and invite others to
live in, but outside of that I cannot breathe. I am guilty of too serious, too grave living, but never of
shallow living. I have lived in the depths. My first tragedy sent me to the bottom of the sea; I live in a
submarine, and hardly ever come to the surface. I love costumes, the foam of aesthetics, noblesse oblige,
and poetic writers. At fifteen I wanted to be Joan of Arc, and later, Don Quixote. I never awakened from
my familiarity with mirages, and I will end probably in an opium den. None of that is suitable for Harper’s
Bazaar.
I am apparently gentle, unstable, and full of pretenses. I will die a poet killed by the nonpoets,
will renounce no dream, resign myself to no ugliness, accept nothing of the world but the one I made myself.
I wrote, lived, loved like Don Quixote, and on the day of my death I will say: ‘Excuse me, it was all a
dream,’ and by that time I may have found one who will say: ‘Not at all, it was true, absolutely true.’