if not exactly a novelty book pedaled at $15 a pop (250 words per dollar).
.. This is definitely tedious, and Wallace’s triumph in This is Water is to let us know that he knows it’s tedious—that this “deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories,” as he says in the next sentence, is the “standard requirement of US commencement speeches.”
.. This is Water is the best commencement speech of all time not because it has transcended the formula, flattery, and platitudes that a graduation speech trades in, but precisely because it has mastered them. Wallace does not conceal this.
.. Tell your audiences that they’re too smart to want a certain thing and give it to them anyway. Remind everyone that they’re too hip for corny dad sermonizing and then double down on the corny dad sermonizing. This is a great way to write a commencement speech—not by avoiding platitudes, but by drawing an enchanted circle around yourself where the things we thought were platitudes can be revealed as dazzling truths.
.. that to be sincere is to be banal; and that banality is truth.
.. In 2005, David Foster Wallace stood at a lectern at an elite liberal arts college and explained that the “real value of a real education has nothing to do with knowledge” and everything to do with “simple awareness.” In 2016, the real value of my education is rapidly accumulating interest that no amount of simple awareness is likely to likely to pay off
.. Praising a person for their sincerity too often means praising a person for having feelings, and feelings, for some reason, seem to count less when women have them. It’s hard not to notice that the New Sincerity authors—Franzen, Wallace, Safran Foer—are men; everyone has noticed that David Foster Wallace die-hards are disproportionately men
.. That sincerity has always enfolded an impotent politics. In the speech’s most memorable passage, one exercises their “choice of what not to think” in the supermarket by choosing, despite the tedium and frustration of “adult existence,” to think patient, hospitable thoughts about the other customers:
.. The nice thoughts that we think about people are worth nothing to anyone unless they are meaningfully voiced in the public sphere, unless they’re given an active civic expression. But in Wallace’s vision, one’s obligation to other people begins and ends in the privacy of one’s own mind.
.. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels,
.. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different.
.. Wallace’s idea of a literary rebel risks nothing except ridicule, another way of saying a rebel who risks nothing at all.
.. There is, moreover, a blind arrogance in the belief that what you primarily owe the world is your sincerity: the gift of your outspoken, unmediated self, your willingness to be the most you that you can be.
.. It’s a belief in which simply existing becomes an act of bravery—which in a private, harrowing way, it was for Wallace. We know that now. But the truth remains that for most people like him—white, male, preternaturally talented—being in the world is not a matter of moral courage. To be male, gifted and white is to be as safe on Earth as any mortal can expect to be, to live in the ambivalent knowledge that the greatest violence you’re likely to encounter is the violence that you do to yourself.
.. Irony has nearly died this election cycle, with Donald Trump turning the sincerity fetish into orange-haired flesh, disabling irony by embodying satire. He has made sexism, racism, and Mussolini quotations brave simply by making them sincere. Donald Trump speaks truth to power—“power” in this case being women, immigrants, and “the establishment” ..
.. But I don’t know what literature is about. I’m not sure that it’s about what it feels like to be a human being. I’m not sure that it makes us kinder, more empathetic, more humane.