Mario A. Maggioni legge David Foster Wallace (et al.

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Mario A. Maggioni on David Foster Wallace (and others)

I would like to start my “Invited Lecture” by proposing to slightly change the title that my
colleague and friend Enrico Reggiani proposed me when he “graciously invited” me to join his
group of colleagues to “la Musa Economica e gli economisti”.
I used the verb “Invited”…
… However, after agreeing to be in the party of “la Musa Economica e gli economisti” I felt like a
crew member of an English Navy sail ship in the 17th century taken into service by compulsion,
with or without notice (note: the technical term is “impressment”.)
So, despite the original question posed by Enrico to start with was:
“Why do an economist like you does read Foster Wallace?” I would like to change slightly his
question into: “Why do I love DFW”?
Please note that the changes are small but relevant:
1) The question: why do you read (and you may substitute David Foster Wallace with any other
author’s name) does bear very little sense to me: I do read because that’s an “addiction” I
developed when I was 11 years old, during my junior high school, when I suffered from
insomnia. The only “cure” I found was to read books until I got so tired that I felt asleep. Habits
are slow to form but hard to abandon… so here I am, an almost compulsory omnivorous
readers (a PhD student of mine once gave me as a present a lapel pin with the statement
“Bookaholic and Proud” and since then I sport not on my jacket – because I usually do not wear
jacket – but on my backpack)
2) I used love because no other term can be used to describe the relation I have with an author
with whom I felt such a special relationship, despite founding some of his books disturbingly
weird!
Now after this long and tiresome introduction, I would like you to experience a text by DFW read
by its very author ( note: whenever possible in this lecture I will try to have native speakers taking
the floor on my behalf since it’s so unnerving to know that I am recording a lecture which will be
heard by students of a school of foreign languages so better skilled than me in both vocabulary,
pronunciation, grammar and syntax!!) so that you will immediately feel in the thick of things
Entire Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5oj5WSCClw (length= 2’46”) of the following
text
I confess that I have never understood why so many people’s idea of a fun vacation is to don flip-flops
and sunglasses and crawl through maddening traffic to loud, hot, crowded tourist venues in order to
sample a “local flavor” that is by definition ruined by the presence of tourists. This may (as my festival
companions keep pointing out) all be a matter of personality and hardwired taste: the fact that I do
not like tourist venues means that I’ll never understand their appeal and so am probably not the one
to talk about it (the supposed appeal). But, since this FN will almost surely not survive magazine-editing
anyway, here goes:
As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not
good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-
honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not
been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and

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 context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and
humbling in the hardest way — hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow
outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and
repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a
pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in
a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are
there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better,
realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension
of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but
existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

And you must consider that this “chunklet of the tile piece of the non fiction book ‘Consider the
lobster’” lies not in the first page neither in its conclusion... nor in the middle of the most central
and crucial action of the paper… but at the end of a footnote! (footnote 6 to be precise!)
So if you would ask me again “why do you love DFW” I may also add that
One of the things so exiting about him was his ambition about writing about the totality of the culture,
and language as an entry point with all those language systems that Wallace was so good at getting
down and then twerking … and not afraid of having ideas in fiction as well. … and then marrying that
kind of DeLillo idea driven stuff with this colloquial, accessible, sort of self-deprecating kind of Salinger
voice that sounded very young … and what make him unique is that in his engagement of received
languages and clichés … and these things, like the 12 steps or recovery language he was interrogating
and sort of seeing it both banal and reductive and yet, something that can save somebody’s life. So
there is this complicated things about earnestness and irony together that was really Wallace’s sweet
spot, a thing that he owned.
… but let’s stop stealing the quotes form Dana Spiotta’s intervention at the New Yorker Festival in
2012 in a panel entitled “re-reading David Foster Wallace” and let her speaks her own words:
see 9’50” -14’00” of this video https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/rereading-david-foster-
wallace
And about his earnestness and irony one cannot escape (I will certainly not do it) to quote the
commencement speech delivered at Kenyon College for the class of 2005
minutes 2’8” until the end (of part 1)
https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water-1
I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché 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 50 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

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rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that 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 realest, 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 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.”

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 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.
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.

minute 0- 5’50” (of part 2)

https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water-2

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 manoeuvre 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.

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 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, 40-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.
Further I should mention that what strike me about his essays (I do appreciate DFW mostly for his
non-fiction rather than for his fiction production) is the great insights he is able to convey about
the larger picture, the structure of our society just by talking about a specific details. In a sense, I
think he was for sure a fantastic social scientist and, somehow, a fine economist, or an historian of
economic thought as in this passage of an interview with Larry McCaffery
LM: Television may be more complex than what most people realize, but it seems rarely to attempt to
“challenge” or “disturb” its audience, as you’ve written me you wish to. Is it that sense of challenge
and pain that makes your work more “serious” than most television shows?
DFW: […] (I) now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art
whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences
prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain.
Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you
uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true
pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially
a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure
effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s
readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort
of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively
and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.
[…]

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 LM: The media seems to me to be one thing that has drastically changed this relationship. It’s provided
people with this television-processed culture for so long that audiences have forgotten what a
relationship to serious art is all about.
DFW: Well, it’s too simple to just wring your hands and claim TV’s ruined readers. Because the U.S.’s
television culture didn’t come out of a vacuum. What TV is extremely good at—and realize that this is
“all it does”—is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. And since
there’s always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering, TV’s going
to avoid these like the plague in favor of something anesthetic and easy.
LM: You really think this distaste is distinctly American?
DFW: It seems distinctly Western-industrial, anyway. In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a
symptom that’s causing you to suffer, they view this as basically healthy and natural, a sign that your
nervous system knows something’s wrong. For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without
addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire’s still going. But if you
just look at the number of ways that we try like hell to alleviate mere symptoms in this country- from
fast-fast-fast-relief antacids to the popularity of lighthearted musicals during the Depression—you can
see an almost compulsive tendency to regard pain itself as the problem. And so pleasure becomes a
value, a teleological end in itself. It’s probably more Western than U.S. per se. Look at utilitarianism—
that most English of contributions to ethics- and you see a whole teleology predicated on the idea
that the best human life is one that maximizes the pleasure-to-pain ratio. God, I know this sounds
priggish of me. All I’m saying is that it’s shortsighted to blame TV. It’s simply another symptom. TV
didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented
aggression. Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies,
upped the stakes.
Or in a not so famous passage in The Pale King
As many people here remember, in 1977, during high inflation, high deficits, and my second enrollment
at DePaul, there was a state fiscal experiment in Illinois in which the state sales tax was to be made
progressive instead of proportional. This was probably my first experience of seeing how the
implementation of tax policy can actually affect people’s lives. As mentioned, sales taxes are normally
almost universally proportional. As I now understand it, the idea behind trying a progressive sales tax
was to raise state tax revenues while not inflicting hardship on the state’s poor or discouraging
investors, plus also to help combat inflation by taxing consumption. The idea was that the more you
bought, the more tax you paid, which would help discourage demand and ease inflation. The
progressive sales tax was the brainchild of someone high up in the State Treasurer’s Office in 1977.
Just who this person was, or whether he wore the brown helmet in some way after the resulting
disaster, I do not know, but both the state treasurer and the governor of Illinois definitely lost their
jobs over the fiasco. Whoever’s fault it ultimately was, though, it was a major tax-policy boner, which
actually could have been easily prevented if anyone in the State Treasurer’s Office had bothered to
consult with the Service about the advisability of the scheme. Despite the existence of both the
Midwest Regional Commissioner’s Office and a Regional Examination Center within Illinois’s borders,
however, it’s an established fact that this never occurred. Despite state revenue agencies’ reliance on
federal tax returns and the Service’s computer system’s master files in the enforcement of state tax
law, there is a tradition of autonomy and distrust among state revenue offices for federal agencies like
the IRS, which sometimes results in key communication lapses, of which the 1977 Illinois sales tax
disaster is, within the Service, a classic case, and the subject of numerous professional jokes and
stories. As almost anyone here at Post 047 could have told them, a fundamental rule of effective tax
enforcement is remembering that the average taxpayer is always going to act out of his own monetary
self-interest. This is basic economic law. In taxation, the result is that the taxpayer will always do
whatever the law allows him to do in order to minimize his taxes. This is simple human nature, which
the Illinois officials either failed to understand or neglected to see the implications of for sales tax
transactions. It may be a case of the State Treasurer’s Office allowing the whole matter to get so
complex and theoretical that they failed to see what was right in front of their nose — the base, B, of

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 a progressive tax cannot be something which can be easily subdivided. If it can be easily subdivided,
then the average taxpayer, acting out of his own economic interest, will do whatever he can legally do
to subdivide the B into two or more smaller Bs in order to avoid the effective progression. And this, in
late 1977, was precisely what happened. The result was retail chaos. At, for instance, the supermarket,
shoppers would no longer purchase three large bags of groceries for $78 total and submit to paying 6,
6.8, and 8.5 percent on those parts of their purchases over $5.00, $20.00, and $42.01, respectively —
they were now motivated to structure their grocery purchase as numerous separate small purchases
of $4.99 or less in order to take advantage of the much more attractive 3.75 percent sales tax on
purchases under $5.00. The difference between 8 percent and 3.75 percent is more than enough to
establish incentive and make citizens’ economic self-interest kick in. So, at the store, you suddenly had
everyone buying under $5.00 worth of groceries and running out to their car and putting the little bag
in the car and running back in and buying another amount under $5.00 and running out to their car,
and so on and so forth. Supermarkets’ checkout lines started going all the way to the back of the store.
Department stores were just as bad, and I know gas stations were even worse — only a few months
after the supply shock of OPEC and fights in gas lines over rationing, now, in Illinois that autumn, fights
also broke out at gas stations from drivers being forced to wait as people ahead of them at the pump
tried putting $4.99 worth in and running in and paying and running back out and resetting the pump
and putting in another $4.99, and so on. It was the exact opposite of mellow, to say the least. And the
administrative burden of calculating sales tax over four separate margins of purchases just about broke
retail stores. Those with automated registers and bookkeeping systems saw the systems crash under
the new load. From what I understand, the high administrative costs of the new bookkeeping burden
got passed along and caused an inflationary spike in Illinois, which then further aggrieved consumers
who were already peeved because the progressive sales tax was economically forcing them to go
through checkout lines half a dozen times or more, in many cases. There were some riots, especially
in the southern part of the state, which abuts Kentucky and tends not to be what you’d call
understanding or sympathetic about government’s need to collect revenue in the first place. The truth
is that northern, central, and southern Illinois are practically different countries, culturally speaking.
But the chaos was statewide. The state treasurer was burnt in effigy. Banks saw a run on ones and
change. From the perspective of administrative costs, the worst part came when enterprising
businesses saw a new opportunity and started using ‘Subdividable!’ as a sales inducement. Including,
for instance, used-car dealers that were willing to sell you a car as an agglomeration of separate little
transactions for front bumper, right rear wheel well, alternator coil, spark plug, and so on, the purchase
structured as thousands of different $4.99 transactions. It was technically legal, of course, and other
big-ticket retailers soon followed — but I think it was when Realtors also got into the practice of
subdividing that things really fell apart. Banks, mortgage brokers, dealers in commodities and bonds,
and the Illinois Department of Revenue all saw their data processing systems buckle — the progressive
sales tax produced a veritable tidal wave of subdivided-sales information that drowned the existing
technology. The whole thing was repealed after less than four months. Actually, the state legislators
came back to Springfield from their Christmas recess in order to convene and repeal it, as that period
had been the most disastrous for retail commerce — holiday-season shopping in 1977 was a nightmare
that people still sometimes chat ruefully about with strangers when they become stuck in checkout
lines here in the state even now, years later. Rather the same way extreme heat or mugginess will
make people reminisce together about other terrible summers they both remember. Springfield is the
state capital, by the way, as well as the site of an incredible amount of Lincoln memorabilia.

So, in conclusion, if I had to specify what attracted (and still attracts) me to DFW artistic
production (both fiction and non-fiction novel, essays and short stories, is this incredible mix of
analytic (almost academic) precision of language, concepts, idea and his deep emotional
involvement in what he was writing about.
Thus, I love DFW because when I read him a realize what deeply and truly constitutes me as a
human being and in a strange and subtle way - even when he is describing some sort of nasty
negative repelling evil character – he is telling me how to be a better man

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In the previously quoted interview with Larry McCAffery DFW said
DFW: I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb
the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is
sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable
part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of
suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this
make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction
can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive
of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.

And to leave the scene with a bang why not quote it’ most fantastic sentence again in the
commencement address
audio 7’55”-11’07” (of part 2)
https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water-2
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, clichés, 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 centre 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.
Thank you for your attention and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9434BoGkNQ

8
References
McCaffery Larry (1993) “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace”, The Review of Contemporary
Fiction,” Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2 available at https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-
with-david-foster-wallace-by-larry-mccaffery/
Spiotta Dana (2012), intervention at the Panel on “Re-reading David Foster Wallace” at the New
Yorker Festival, available at https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/rereading-david-foster-
wallace
Foster Wallace David (2005) “Commencement Speech at Kenyon College Class of 2005” available
as transcript and audio files at https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
Foster Wallace David (2011) “the Pale King: an Unfinished Novel”, Little, Brown & Co