Contents
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008), regarded as one of the preeminent contemporary writers, lived to be only 46 years old. In 2005, he read a speech to the graduates of one of the US universities. In it, he reflects on true freedom and why there are no atheists in the trenches of adulthood.
“Two young fish are swimming nearby and meet an old fish, she nods and says: “Good morning guys, how is your water?” Young fish swim on, after a while one of them turns to the other and asks: “What the hell is water?”
The point of this story is that the most obvious and important truths are often the hardest to see. This statement sounds terribly trite, but in the trenches of adulthood, platitudes sometimes become a matter of life and death.
Imagine a typical day. You get up in the morning, go to your hard work, work 9-10 hours. At the end of the day, you are tired, tense, and the only thing you dream about is to return home, have dinner, relax for a couple of hours and collapse into bed early, because tomorrow you have to get up again and repeat everything again. Suddenly you remember that there is no food at home because you didn’t have time to go to the store during the week because of the stressful work. You get into your car and drive to the supermarket. End of the day, traffic jams everywhere. The trip takes much longer than it should, and when you finally get to the place, it is already full of people. Everyone is shopping for groceries after work, the store is disgustingly lit with eye-catching fluorescent lights, some soul-killing pop is playing, and this is the last place on Earth you want to be.
You can’t just leave quickly. You have to walk around the store among huge rows of shelves and crowds of people to find the right products, you have to maneuver with your crappy cart among all these tired and hurrying people with their carts. Of course, there are old people around, slow as turtles, and children block the passage, and you have to grit your teeth and politely ask them to step aside. In the end, you collect everything you need for dinner, but then it turns out that, despite the evening rush, there are not enough cash desks open, so there is a long line for them. It’s stupid and terribly infuriating, but you can’t take your anger out on an already twitchy cashier.
Finally, you get to the cash register, pay for your food, wait for the check, they say “Thank you, come again” to you in such a voice as if it were the voice of death itself. Then you still have to carry plastic bags in a cart through a crowded and dirty parking lot and try to load them into the car so that everything does not fall out and spill into the trunk along the way, and drive home through traffic jams.
Read more:
- Letters from the Greats: John Steinbeck on Love
It is in the midst of this petty, exhausting flow of life that we make a very important choice. Whether stuck in a traffic jam or pushing through a crowd at a supermarket, I can decide what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to. The “standard setting” in my head tells me that the main thing in all these situations is me, my hunger and fatigue. , the desire to get home, and it begins to seem that those around me are only here to interfere with me, and who are all these people? See how repulsive most of them look, how empty their eyes are when they are standing in line at the checkout, how rude and annoyingly loud on the phone. It’s not fair: I’ve been working hard all day, I’m hungry, tired, and now I can’t get home to eat and relax because of these damn, stupid people.
Such thoughts come easily, automatically, so no choice is required. Thinking in this way is a natural “standard setting”. This is life on autopilot, a thoughtless feeling of everything boring, annoying, cramped in our adult life, which is based on an unconscious belief that we are the center of the universe, and our momentary needs and experiences should rule this universe. But there are other ways to think about such situations. For example, to imagine that in that Hummer that just cut me off, the father is taking a small sick child to the hospital, he is in a hurry and has much more reason to rush than I do – it turns out that I interfere with him, and not vice versa.
It is hard, it requires will and mental effort, there are days when you, like me, are simply not capable of it. But if you are self-aware enough to make a choice, you can make a decision and look differently at that fat, made-up woman with empty eyes, who is yelling at her child in line at the supermarket checkout. Maybe she’s not always like this, maybe she’s been awake for three nights at the bedside of her husband dying of cancer. Or maybe this is the same woman who works at the post office for a beggarly salary and yesterday, out of simple kindness, helped your husband or wife deal with some terrible bureaucratic red tape.
If you have really learned to think and be attentive, you will understand that you have a choice. You will be able to perceive situations like this consumer hell, where it is crowded, noisy, terribly slow, as valuable and even sacred, filled with the same forces that light the stars – compassion, love, inner harmony and the unity of all things. The truth is that we can decide how to look at a situation, what makes sense and what does not, what or whom to worship.
There are no atheists in the trenches of everyday adult life. It is impossible to live and worship nothing. Everyone believes in something. We can only choose what exactly. The main reason why we choose to worship God or a spiritual entity – be it Jesus Christ, Allah, or some set of inviolable ethical principles – is that if you worship anything else, it will eat you alive. . If you worship money and things – that is, you see the meaning of life in them – you will never be enough with what you have. If you revere your body, beauty, and sex appeal as a shrine, you will always think that you are ugly, and when age begins to affect your appearance, you will die a million times before the time comes to bury you. At some level, we all know this – through myths, proverbs, parables. The challenge is to keep these truths in mind every day. If you are in awe of authority, you will always feel weak and afraid, and you will need more and more power over others to keep your fear at bay. If you build your intellect into a cult, dream of being considered smart, you will constantly seem to yourself a fool, a deceiver who is about to be exposed.
Read more:
- Oscar Brenifier, Jacques Desprez “The Meaning of Life”
The insidiousness of these cults is not that they are evil or sinful, but that they are unconscious. This is the “standard setting”. You slide into it slowly day after day, your view and value system become more selective, and you don’t even fully understand what you are doing. The world will not prevent you from living “standard”, because the world of people, power and money runs great on fuel from fear, contempt, dissatisfaction with yourself, ambition and self-worship. Our culture has harnessed these forces to create incredible levels of wealth, comfort, and personal freedom. Freedom to be the masters of a tiny kingdom in our skull, alone in the center of the universe. This freedom brings many benefits. But there are other types of freedom, and you will not hear about the most valuable freedom in the big world of victories, achievements and self-presentations.
Real freedom requires attentiveness, awareness, discipline and work, the ability to really care for others and sacrifice yourself for them – again and again, every day, through many small, ordinary, not at all “beautiful” actions. This is real freedom. The alternative to it is a thoughtless life, a “standard setting”, the pursuit of success and the constant oppressive feeling that you had, but lost something infinitely important.
Perhaps this doesn’t sound very exciting. Of course, you can think and act as you wish. But I ask you not to dismiss what I have said, considering it to be something like an edifying sermon. I’m not talking about morality, religion, dogma or global issues like life after death. The truth with a capital letter is about life before death. About how to live to 30 or maybe even 50 without dreaming of putting a bullet in your head. It’s about simple awareness – to be aware of what is real, what is really important, but so deeply hidden in the familiar that you have to remind yourself again and again: “This is water, this is water!”
D. Foster Wallace «Commencement speech to a graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio» theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/20/fiction