My First Encounter With David Foster Wallace

       I read David Foster Wallace's Kenyon College 2005 commencement speech for my English course yesterday. In it, he discusses the monotony and frustration of daily adult life that these grads are about to live. He says you can choose how to think, you can spin events, and stop being so negative about things because it will eat you alive. He writes, addressing the liberal arts cliché of learning to think, "Learning how to think means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think... Because if you cannot exercise this type of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed." Now thats all good and well. I agree with Wallace. It's so easy to become the character in Foster Wallace's story that is constantly stressed, negative, in a hurry, and angry the grocery store clerk and surrounding cars.  
       But if you know me, you know I don't often write a blog post because I agree with something someone says. That would be dull. Let me explain:



       I approached David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech with the knowledge that he had committed suicide in 2008. Prior to this, I had not read any of his work, though I knew he was said to be an incredible essayist and novelist. He is on my to-read list. And I knew that he committed suicide sometime in the last decade. This fact seemed far from relevant to the Kenyon commencement speech, but it was the context to which I approached the speech. It's difficult—impossible even—to separate the writer from the text so I dissected his words looking for signs of an unhappy, depressed man. Looking for foreshadowing but knowing it was unlikely in a commencement speech.
       There it was: the word suicide. I got chills when I read it. He says, "It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head." Holy shit, I thought, this is eerie. It continues. He talks about something he calls capital-T Truth: "life before death." Education to him is learning how to think, freedom to think what you choose to think, and not being on your "default setting." He tells the students, "It is unimaginably hard to... stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out." Eerie again.
       I finished this essay not focusing on Foster Wallace's writing ability; not because it was poorly written, but rather, it was not what I was focusing on throughout the speech. I ask, perhaps in my own irrationality, how a man who claims to know the Capital-T Truth can kill himself? Posthumously, it is easy to surmise that Foster Wallace never, in fact, acquired this Truth and upon further research I learned that he suffered from severe depression for over twenty years. Let me be clear, I do not intend to make any judgments on his suicide or suicide in general. But with the knowledge of what did happen, the speech becomes that much more honest than it already was. This graduating class, three years out of college when Foster Wallace took his life, knows he was feeding them clichés. He wasn't feeding them the normal inspirational crap that commencement speeches tend to consist of. But it becomes that much more heartbreaking, too.