Choice by David Foster Wallace

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 23:01:40 +0000

I am 33 now and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster each day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then i have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. ….. If i want to be any kind of grown up i have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

David Foster Wallace

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. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

David Foster Wallace

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:48:07 +0000

I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced and a tropical moon that looked more like a sort of obscenely large and dangling lemon than like the good old stony U.S. moon I’m used to. I have (very briefly) joined a Conga Line.

From A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace.An essay, which recounts Wallace’s experiences on a weeklong Caribbean cruise aboard the m.v. Zenith

David Foster Wallace was a brilliant American writer. A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian.

He committed suicide in Sept 2008 after suffering from depression for over 20 years.

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Choice by David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace