I loved taking umbrage at his wordy brilliance.
I loved rolling my eyes at the footnotes.
I loved never finishing a thing of his because I got filled up so completely, so quickly.
Reading him was like eating cake batter. Sinfully too much of a good thing.
He was brilliant. A real live genius. And he totally got on my nerves. For all the wrong reasons...like envy.
Right now the election of the centuries is going on, right? You know which one I mean. And I am unable to have reasonable discussion about it with anyone who disagrees with me. This causes me to behave like a three year old. I am not a three year old. Therefore I have decreed to self to ignore absolutely everything written, spoken, screamed, blown out of all proportion, and even reported in all earnestness and truthfulness, about the election.
This is not going to be easy. I have four national newspapers showing up at my home a day, for instance.
However, I just read an obituary for David Foster Wallace in which he was quoted from a 2005 commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College. In this speech to twenty-two year olds, he puts perfectly what I am finally trying to learn how to do.
He said "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."
I'll stand behind my man Barak Obama, without making a public spectacle of myself every time I run across someone who plans to vote for the other guy, or I read something I disagree with or catch out of the corner of my eye that enrages me. I choose not to argue.
WHAT A CONCEPT!
Thank you, David Foster Wallace. I am so sorry you had to go.
Comments