Continuing my exploration of suicide authors (those who either killed themselves, experienced it second hand or wrote extensively on the subject). I think this is #5, David Foster Wallace, the one I’d been avoiding because I know how supernaturally intelligent he was, as well as cynical, and was worried he’d somehow convince me to wax myself which I’m not quite ready for yet.
The book is “this is water” which is so short you can literally read it in 20 mins. It’s about 100 pages with 1 sentence per page. The whole thing was transcribed from his speech to the graduating class of some prestigious college I forgot which, in 2005. You can get a used copy of this book on ebay for around $4 so go for it. It fucking rocks.
On page 58 he starts talking about suicide, and this thought develops into the statement that we’re all basically hoping to make it to age 30 or 40 or 50 without shooting ourselves in the head. Wallace himself died by suicide in 2008, age 47. Interestingly enough it was suicide by hanging, not a gun.
Back to the book, which I highly highly recommend if you can’t tell, it’s strangely optimistic. It presents a challenge to all of us. The challege is that, despite the world being fucked up, we have the choice on how to perceive it. We can perceive it in a self-centered way, which is the human default, which doesn’t take a lot of brains to adopt, OR we can escape the trap of selfishness, blindness & fear by instead perceiving the alternate viewpoints that don’t revolve around our own selfish asses.
To illustrate this he makes the wonderful metaphor of going shopping at the end of the day, exhausted from our repetitive daily grind, pissed off because we’re hungry and there’s no food at home so we’re forced to schlep it to the grocery store at rush hour, battle all the inconsiderate assholes blocking the aisle, the annoying lack of checkout lanes, the robotic cashier who says “have a nice day” with the voice of creeping death. We can see things this way, our pre-programmed way that doesn’t take any effort, or we can instead entertain the perspectives of others, even the annoying woman with too much makeup who’s inconsiderately blocking the aisle.
He proposes that maybe the annoying woman has too much makeup because this is the first time she’s been out in public in days because she’s been at her husband’s deathbed all week watching him die of bone cancer.
Unlikely, but possible. It’s at least as possible as the notion that she’s just an inconsiderate a-hole who cakes makeup on her face for the hell of it. And he’s right. The assumption that “everyone is in our way” is just 1 myopic way of seeing the world. To the graduating class of this prestigious college who have proven their intelligence by getting accepted let alone having graduated, he says the value of their education is that now they can choose how to think.
He warns not to blindly accept the pre-planned mode of thinking, what’s pushed by society itself because it’s how society works: on selfishness, “The freedom to live in your skull sized castle alone at the center of all creation.”