someone with whom i'm hopelessly in love, probably always will be, and have no chance whatsoever of ever meeting, let alone making out with...

david foster wallace. say what you will about him (and people do, since it's fairly easy to think of his writing as pompous or arrogant or deliberately obtuse), but come on, the guy won a freaking genius grant back before winning a genius grant was even cool. except that getting a genius grant has always been pretty cool, and lawyers do get them from time to time, so i've still got a chance...

anyway, yeah. i've been reading DFW lately, because of the eight DFW books i own, only two of them are novels, and devoting my fleeting bouts of attention to short stories and essays is about the best i can do lately... i think he's so effing brilliant and hilarious and i would so happily bear his children, even though i don't even want children and the thought of birthing them scares the hell out of me, but there's a whole greater-good justification for bringing as many DFW spawn into the world as possible, you know, for the sake of the future...

this morning i came across this. it's a commencement address that DFW delivered at kenyon in 2005. i wish with all the wishingability in my being that we, the fine pitt law grads of 2007, had gotten a commencement speech like that. here's the best part:

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.

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 center 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 and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. 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.

david foster wallace, if only we could hang out for, like, half an hour, you would have such a crush on me, too. sigh...