This is Water...

It has been three weeks since my dissertation defense and I am finally feeling decompressed enough to turn back to one of my greatest loves: the written word. I tried as hard as I could to direct all of my attention to my research and not become distracted by new fiction or by the dozens of books that I read over and over again when I need comfort or inspiration. Even though spring was meant to be only about criminology studies and not about literature, distractions did creep in, despite my best efforts.


Last year, the New York Times reported that a biography of one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, would be released at some point in the spring of 2010.

I pre-ordered it on Amazon and even though I should not have given in to the temptation, after the introduction, I couldn't put it down. It was better than I imagined. In the next several posts I will transcribe a few excerpts that I thought were particularly fantastic. In the meantime, I want to begin this bit of David Foster Wallace obsession with an excerpt from a speech that DFW gave as a commencement address. The full text is available in many places, including published as a small book.

Here are a few excerpts that moved me:

"So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think… But 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 ... isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about."

"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…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."

"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…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."