DFW: Commencement High Notes

Okay, I've re-read the DFW Kenyon commencement, and now I really think you all need to read it. Not only does it speak to the art of being human, it is the road map to being a writer. In an effort to entice you to read the thing in its entirety, here are just a few highlights:

___

On Being Just a Little Less Arrogant:

"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."

___

On Not Being Totally Hosed:

"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 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."

___

There Are Other Options:

"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."

___

On Real Freedom:

"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.…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."

___

On Staying Conscious and Alive in the Adult World Day In and Day Out:

"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. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck."

___

That last part goes double for being a writer because trying to stay "conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out" is exactly what it means to be a writer.

If you're at all interested in Wallace, check out this article he wrote for the NY Times. It's germane to nonfiction because it's, well, nonfiction. It's about Roger Federer, but that's not the point. The point is, Wallace is using all the toolbelts and applying them to something for which he has a visceral, intense love: tennis. And, of course, he's doing so in a love-it-or-hate-it Voice that is uniquely his own.

So, yeah. I think there's a lot to learn from David Foster Wallace, both exemplary and cautionary.

*