DFW

Hey, my love letter to the RPL was the 100th entry on this blog! I had intended to make a big deal about it, but I forgot. And now I want YOU to forget, too, because for a change I have something more important to say.

While shamelessly reading the entirety of the blog of a volunteer teacher at the Asian University for Women (where I hope to be volunteering myself next year), I stumbled across David Foster Wallace's commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

I can't possibly quote all of the good parts--go read the whole thing.

David Foster Wallace was a wise man and his death is a terrible loss.