Forgive the length of this entry.  It’s an entry about David Foster Wallace; it must be long.

I read the news about David Foster Wallace’s death right before going to bed last night; some time around 3 a.m., I awoke from a dream in which it was revealed that his death was faked.  I wish the dream had been true.

David Foster Wallace is (was?  No.  Is.) my favorite prose writer, and will be, I think, one of the few writers of recent years who’ll be remembered for years to come.  His Infinite Jest is, and I really don’t think I’m overstating this in any way, one of the greatest literary accomplishments of the 20th century.  It is both tragic and terrifying that such a brilliant mind is gone.

Though, based on what I knew of DFW, I knew it wasn’t the best idea, I was still compelled to write to him the summer of my sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence.  I composed an admittedly somewhat insane fan letter, filled, for some reason which seemed logical to my twenty-year-old self, with references to Richard Nixon and strange graphics clipped from a set of encyclopedias from the early 1960’s.  Much to my surprise, months later, a letter arrived in the mail: a thank-you note from DFW himself, scrawled on the same Crayola stationary I myself had used many years before.  The incredible generosity of this gesture has always inspired me: this is exactly the kind of kindness we need desperately, not only in the literary world, but in the world at large.

This morning, my friend R. posted a link to DFW’s Kenyon commencement address at Kenyon College.  This speech says so much about so much: what education should do, what liberal arts education should mean, how we should live in this world.  You, gentle reader, should read the whole thing (no, seriously.  Stop what you are doing.  Put down your coffee or your Diet Coke.  Read the whole thing); I’m going to post this part, which most touched me this morning:

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, 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.

The truth that DFW told, more than any, seems to be the ultimate truth, which, of course, means the truth that we most often ignore: “The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.”