Still Swimming: David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College

I snuck into another reading group this summer, a sensibly paced one with bite-sized assignments: essays, chapters, meditations. I figured I could swing it. And that I could use it. For as many good folks and dear friends as I have, there’s a troubling lack of day-to-day interaction in my life with people I’d consider peers.

Two reasons for this: First, I work from home, so the necessity of rubbing shoulders with the masses is minimal. Secondly, my scribblings and my ruminations–all that indulgent soul-scratching stuff that I really do want to do and do so much better–demand a quantity of focused mind-space that is always in desperately short supply.

Always isolated, never much alone: Such is the quandary. But as the heart withers when not well-watered by the silver rivers of human kindness, I really do need to get out more.

Last week we took a look at David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the lucky 2005 graduating class at Kenyon college. Lucky indeed. Famous speaker or not, how many tassle-turning admonitions are remembered past dessert? How many go viral? How many kids get David Freakin’ Foster Wallace?

We got Lynne Cheney, but that’s another story.

If you don’t know DFW’s homily, take a moment to google and read or listen. The full title is as follows: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.

The important part comes at the end of the title, “…Living a Compassionate Life,” and that’s the thing that I completely missed the first time I read the essay years ago. Back then, I was mostly intrigued by the “Water”–DFW’s term for the set of self-centered assumptions, so often petty and bourgeois, that we swim in without thought or awareness, like fish in a consumer-spawning sea. My take-away then? “Yeah man! Corporate life sucks the big one!”

Thankfully, I’ve made a little progress. But it seems there’s still much more to go. One section in particular sank its hook in me:

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, bet 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.

I had to ask myself: What then, do I worship? What is my “default setting”?

To answer that I’ll need to take a detour through another conversation I had not long ago about the Enneagram. Ever heard of it? It’s sort of a personality test thingy, the kind of figure-you-out system that DFW might spend some time hashing out were he still with us. (Let’s not forget the Myers-Briggs speculations noting “Infinite Jest” could be an expansion of “INFJ”.)

I do need to subject myself to a proper Enneagram vetting one of these days, hopefully under professional adult supervision. But the early signs point to Personality Type 4: The Individualist.

In other words, my default setting, and the object of my worship is this: my Indomitable Individuality.

Rings true. True enough for a blog post at least. And that’s been good, and that’s been bad. For those who’ve enjoyed my company, it’s been the subterranean source my worth-knowingness. To the rest of you, I apologize. It’s just made me a pain-in-the-ass.

When I’ve been at my best, that individuality has been a root that has born much fruit, an abundance shared freely. And the rest of the time? It’s tripped me up and shut me down and torpedoed a thousand decent, noble and respectable–if numbingly pedestrian–opportunities.

Although DFW doesn’t call out Individuality as a specific vice, he does pointedly disparage the “tiny skull-sized kingdom” that each of us holds so dear. Close enough. But there’s only so much I can do. It’s my water: my default setting.

And I think he would say I’m kinda screwed.

Maybe. But I know I’m making progress. I know I re-read this assignment with wiser eyes now than I did back then; I know I’ve learned something over the last decade or so. That’s not nothing. As DFW sums it up: “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.” So maybe he’d cut me some slack?

I’m still learning. Still swimming.