David Foster Wallace on Attention and Compassion

[Bill Gardner]

I've just finished reading, for perhaps the fifth time, DFW's 2005 Commencement Address at Kenyon College (also recently published as This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, ...).

It is brief, so please just go read it. I do not have the sense that he was Buddhist, but it is a direct and powerful statement about freedom, attention, and compassion.

Here is a taste: "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. "

[Tardy Eye of Common Courtesy]

Hi
I think I got the drift..."hosed is an interesting choice of word for consequences" If I'm not mistaken the difference between the guy who is ticked off and the person who is mindful, in what looks to be boing, meaningless and frustrating is gratitude. A grateful heart/mind can turn things around pretty fast. I think a large part of turning the mind when we experience those very negative difficult thoughts and feelings in our day to day life is catching ourselves doing the thinking. I often have arguments with my mind to just stop what ever it is I happen to be obsessing about. Kind of like hold that thought , only you're saying it to yourself. So then my question is ...what is Mind.? This may have to be a seperate discussion. Thanks for the post.

[Loren Enders]

"But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop."

Gratitude, right on. Reminded me of this quote:

"Motivation - The purpose of my life is to free the numberless sentient beings who are the source of all my past, present, and future happiness, temporary as well as ultimate happiness - including all the realizations of the path, liberation from samsara, and enlightenment - from all the oceans of samsaric suffering, including the causes: delusion and karma." Thirty-Five Confession Buddhas

[fivebells]

Thanks for posting this. What a terrific essay. It's such a shame he chose to suicide, himself.

[Bill Gardner]

He will be remembered among the very great American writers. Try Googling "Federer as religious experience".

[Rob MacLachlan]

Evidently David Foster Wallace experienced and was treated for clinical depression over two decades, obviously with benefit. His son's choice to terminate long-term antidepressant medication in favor of other strategies in 2007 proved "catastrophic", according to his father. Another public example of our genetic and biological vulnerabilities.

[Bill Gardner]

Apparently he felt that the medications interfered with his ability to write. And that was everything for him. Part of me wants to say that was foolish... but I found that even mild memory efforts from beta blockers seemed intolerable.