DFW on Fear and Love

1 John 4:18: There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.

From the short story Good Old Neon by David Foster Wallace, collected in Oblivion. Narrator posthumously (sadly, foretellingly) recounts his meetings with his psychotherapist:

"For instance, it turned out that one of his basic operating premises was the claim that there were really only two basic, fundamental orientations a person could have toward the world, (1) love and (2) fear, and that they couldn't coexist (or, in logical terms, that their domains were exhaustive and mutually exclusive, or that their two sets had no intersection but their union comprised all possible elements, or that

(ψx)((Fx - ~(Lx)) & (Lx - ~ (Fx))) & ~ ((эx) (~(Fx) & ~(Lx)),

meaning in other words that each day of your life was spent in service to one of these masters or the other, and 'One cannot serve two masters' - the Bible again - and that one of the worst things about the. the conception of competitive, achievement-oriented masculinity that America supposedly hardwired into its males was that it caused a more or less constant state of fear that made genuine love next to impossible. That is, that what passed for love in American men was usually just the need to be regarded in a certain way, meaning that today's males were so constantly afraid of 'not measuring up' (Dr. G's phrase, with evidently no pun intended) that they had to spend all their time convincing others of their masculine 'validity' (which happens to also be a term from formal logic) in order to ease their own insecurity, making genuine love next to impossible.

Although it seemed a little bit simplistic to see this fear as just a male problem (try watching a girl stand on a scale sometime), it turns out that Dr. Gustafson was very nearly right in his concept of the two masters - though not in the way that he, when alive and confused about his own real identity believed - and even while I played along by pretending to argue or not quite understand what he was driving at, the idea struck me that maybe the real root of my problem was not fraudulence but a basic inability to really love . . . ."

Another Christmas Arrives: DFW on Federer, Pinsky on Donne, Gervais on Atheism, The National Bible Bee, Backfiring (!) Smoking Bans, and Troubled Childhoods

Just the links this time, for some holiday reading:

1. On Slate, if you have time for a mind-bender, The Philosophical Underpinnings of David Foster Wallace's Fiction (hint: rhymes with Littgenstein). For some prime DFW himself, check out his renowned profile for the NY Times, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience." For all of our posts on DFW, click here.

2. Also on Slate, in a column entitled "Nearer, my God, to Thee", former poet laureate Robert Pinksy takes a look at man's relationship to the divine via two Jeremiah 12-based sonnets, one from John Donne and one from Gerald Manley Hopkins.

3. Comedian and actor Ricky Gervais, a favorite of ours, offers a pleasantly humane/funny explanation of his atheism over at the Wall Street Journal. Almost makes up for the ueber-preachy "The Invention of Lying" (ht JD).

4. In the Atlantic, an amusing and highly informative look at The National Bible Bee.

5. From the NY Times, a harrowing reality-check about infidelity and its fallout, A Roomful of Regret and Yearning (ht VH).

6. A post on the Times' Freakonomics blog asks the question, "Do Smoking Bans Lead to More Fires?" A recent paper responds... yes.

7. According to a new poll by the Center for Disease Control (last seen in The Walking Dead), 60% of American adults claim to have had troubled childhoods.

8. Finally, there's this:

Nativity Scene FAIL - watch more funny videos

And with that, Merry Christmas from Mockingbird! Thanks for reading this year. We'll see you in January (if not before).

David Foster Wallace on Fear, Achievement and Internal Means

One last quote from the book-length interview Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, after which I promise to give the St. Dave stuff a rest:

That the fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons for why we're so afraid. But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job that we're here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we're not terrified all the time. And not in a position of using all kinds of different things, and using people to keep that kind of terror at bay. That is my personal opinion.

Well for me, as an American male, the face I'd put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing's enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough. That there's a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuageable by outside stuff. And my guess is that that's been what's going on, ever since people were hitting each other over the head with clubs. Though describable in a number of different words and cultural argots. And that our particular challenge is that there's never been more and better stuff comin' from the outside, that seems temporarily to sort of fill the hole or drown out the hole.

Could it be assuageable by internal means also?

Personally, I believe that if it's assuageable in any way it's by internal means. And I don't know what that means. I think it's fine in some way. [Tape off again; we keep turning it off while he mentally drafts and redrafts answers.] I think its probably assuageable by internal means. I think those internal means have to be earned and developed, and it has something to do with, um, um, the pop-psych phrase is lovin' yourself.

It's more like, if you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it. [Spits with mouthful voice into cup.] I know that sounds a little pious.

David Foster Wallace on Cruises, Ambition and the Discontented Self

A few more priceless quotes from the book-length interview Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, pg. 256-57, this time touching on the black hole of ambition, inwardly-speaking, in regards to the law:

The great lie of the [ocean-liner] cruise is that enough pleasure and enough pampering will quiet this discontented part of you. When in fact, all it does is up the requirement... I can remember being twenty-four years old and having my, you know, smiling mug in The New York Times Book Review, and it feeling really good for exactly like ten seconds.

And then you're hungry for more. So that, clearly, I mean if you're not stupid, you figure out that the real problem is the discontented self. That all this stuff that you think will work for a second, but then all it does is set up a hunger for more and better. 

And... that general pattern and syndrome seems to me to get repeated, at least in our culture, for our kind of plush middle-class part of the culture, over and over and over again in a million different arenas. And that we don't seem to get it. We do not seem to get it...

It may be that those ambitions are what get you to do the work, to get the exposure, to realize that the original ambitions were misguided. Right? So that it's a weird paradoxical link. If you didn't have the ambitions, you'd never find out that they were sort of deluded.

David Foster Wallace on Infinite Jest, America and God

At the risk of DFW-overload, here's an interesting bit from the same interview, speaking in 1996 about the then-brand new Infinite Jest:

"The only thing that I knew for sure, I wanted to do something that wasn't just high comedy, I wanted to do something that was very, very much about America. And the things that ended up for me being most distinctively American right now, around the millennium, had to do with both entertainment and about some kind of weird addictive, um... wanting to give yourself away to something. That I ended up thinking was kind of a distorted religious impulse. And a lot of the AA stuff in the book was mostly an excuse, was to try to have - it's very hard to talk about people's relationship with any kind of God, in any book later than like Dostoyevsky. I mean the culture, it's all wrong for it now. You know? No, no. Plausibly realistic characters don't sit around talking about this stuff. You know?

So... I don't know. But the minute I start talking about it, it just, it sounds number one: very vague. Two: really reductive. And the whole thing to me was so complicated, that you know it took sixteen hundred pages of sort of weird oblique stuff to even start to talk about it. And I feel stupid, talking about it.

Interviewer: Why?

Extemporaneously. I feel stupid talking about it this way. Because it's like, because I don't have a diagnosis. I don't have a system of prescriptions. I don't have four things that I think are wrong. I don't have four different... opinions about it. It seems to me that it's more of a feeling, a sort of texture of feeling.

You know, why are we - and by 'we' I mean people like you and me: mostly white, upper middle class or upper class, obscenely well educated, doing really interesting jobs, sitting in really expensive chairs, watching the best, you know, watching the most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy - why do we feel so empty and unhappy?"

(More) David Foster Wallace on Depression

From the recently published book-length interview Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself:

"I'm not biochemically depressed. But I feel like I got to dip my toe in that wading pool and, um, not going back there is more important to me than anything... It's worse than any kind of physical injury, or any kind of - it may be what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis or whatever. It's just the feeling as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn't function. And it was just, it was horrible. And trying to be at Harvard, and to read about "freedom of the will" with John Rawls while thinking this way was just extremely unpleasant." (p. 67-68)

Another Week Ends: More Shore, Facebook Happiness, DFW, Marriage, IMonk and The National

1. John Shore's follow-up to his Huffington Post piece, "How My Wife Took The News Of My Sudden Conversion". It should be noted that Mr. Shore published a book in 2007 with the killer title: "I'm OK-You're Not: The Message We're Sending To Non-Believers And Why We Should Stop". Along those lines, it's worth taking a look at his post "What Non-Christians Want Christians To Hear".

2. Fascinating report from the San Fracisco Chronicle about behavior on Facebook and LinkedIn. Turns out both networks employ scientists whose sole job it is to track and analyze our behavior... With a particular focus on happiness:

"You can have a very statistical picture of how the happiness of an entire population of people is changing over time," said Marlow, 33. "We might not be able to really detect your happiness very well, but when we add all those up, we get a very clear picture of what the entire country is feeling."

The index shows the happiest days are holidays like Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day and Easter. Sporting events, such as the Super Bowl and World Cup soccer matches, generate peaks and valleys. Michael Jackson's untimely death caused a "very negative" day, [Cameron Marlow, manager of the "data science team" for Palo Alto's Facebook Inc.] said.

Becoming engaged makes women less happy. "Maybe this is the effect of having to plan a wedding,"  Marlow said. "While the process of being engaged is stressful for women, once you're married, then in general, you're less negative than you were before. But if you're a man, then something else changes, it increases the negativity. These fit the gender stereotypes so perfectly that it's almost uncanny."

3. As you wait for your copy to arrive of David Lipsky's new book "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace", be sure to read the ongoing discussion among the critics over at NY Magazine. They discuss the "St. Dave" phenomenon at length (I'm not convinced). I was especially interested to find out that when asked about his Top Ten Favorite Books, DFW turned in this list, giving C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters the top spot, and Stephen King's The Stand number two! Its seriousness has long been debated, with the final verdict being that it's the genuine article, i.e., not meant to be sarcastic or (ht Hammer) ironic.

[CONTINUE READING]

The Perspective of David Foster Wallace

This is just a little something for your Friday afternoon, if you have the time.

I know this is a rather long video, but it's definitely worthwhile. It's the author himself reading two brilliantly humorous yet thoughtful works. His style has a way of using humor to get past the heart's defenses in order to communicate some deeper truth at the same time.

Of course, we now know all to well that behind his humorous approach was a fellow sufferer who tragically ended his life before its time (though every death is untimely), but while he was with us his "low voice" had an innate ability to "tremble into the hearts of men", to borrow a phrase from Wilder's Angel that Troubled the Waters.

It's a shame and a real loss that he is no longer among us, making his keen observations of what we otherwise consider normal human behavior (which he shows us time and again is normal only in its prevalence, not in its inherent qualities).

That said, I'm sure if you do have the time this will make you smile and stretch your view of the human condition all at the same time:

David Foster Wallace on David Lynch, LOST (by extension), Irony, and Preaching

From DFW's definitive take on Lynch "David Lynch Keeps His Head":

Like most storytellers who use mystery as a structural device and not a thematic device, Lynch is way better at deepening and complicating mysteries than he is at wrapping them up. And [Twin Peaks]' second season showed that he was aware of this and that it was making him really nervous. By its thirtieth episode, the show had degenerated into tics and shticks and mannerisms and red herrings, and part of the explanation for this was that Lynch was trying to divert our attention from the fact that he really had no idea how to wrap the central murder case up.

So the obvious question is, does this apply to LOST? Does anyone think "Darlton" has a prayer of wrapping it up in a satisfying way? If so, how? Please share. But before/while you do, chew on this DFW quote about irony:

Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? “Sure.” Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

Finally, in the same interview he talks about the purpose of art, which sounds remarkably similar to preaching:

[CONTINUE READING]

Another Week Ends: Whole Foods, Heidi Montag, Colombian Eunuchs, Dostoevsky vs Marquis de Sade, DFW

1. A fascinating profile in last week's New Yorker of John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, sort of a footnote to JDK's recent post on environmentalism. There is a lot in the article worth mentioning, but for our purposes, I thought it was particularly interesting that Whole Foods was founded as a self-consciously non-judgmental health food store (ht RJH):

"[The first Whole Foods store] was ten thousand square feet. They stocked not just lentils and granola but, in contravention of the co-op ethos, indulgences like meat, beer, and wine; there were aisles full of five-gallon bottles of distilled water, to avoid the embarrassment of empty shelf space. The idea was to go beyond the movement’s old tofu severity, the air of judgment and self-abnegation."

The rest of the article then details the enormous backlash Whole Foods has provoked - primarily because of its non-severe ethos - from the more Pharisaical elements within the Green movement. Not that Mackey is really worth defending, as there are plenty of other factors at play here, but it does appear that he has touched a major nerve, that the granola folks may not be as granola as they appear...

2. In the denial-aint-just-a-river-in-Egypt department (and no, I can't believe I'm dignifying this either), the Good Morning America interview with Heidi Montag this week about her recent plastic surgery has got to be seen to be believed. Poor girl. Even she doesn't appear to buy the Christian rhetoric she tosses out at the end (ht AZ).

3. Next, this kindly Colombian farmer may be a sincere believer, but man oh man... He takes the concept outward righteousness to a whole new (and disturbing) level. If only someone had read the Sermon on the Mount to him before it was too late. [Warning: not for the faint of heart - especially those of the male persuasion].

4. Finally, and in keeping with the rather saucy tone this week [sorry!], a philosophically riveting and relatively PG-rated article entitled "Dostoevsky vs. Marquis de Sade". One notable excerpt (ht DB):

"Put in another way, Dostoevsky now sees man much as Sade does: self-willed, desiring unfettered free choice, prone to commit irrational acts to transcend determinism, lacking moral sense, and a potential sadist. Moreover, "progress," blinking man's need for moral order and spiritual fulfillment, is lethally wrongheaded, inciting sadistic transgressions."

BONUS TRACK: Just because it has generated about 34 more comments than I thought it would, here's another quote from David Foster Wallace about the self- perpetuating nature of depression. The opening to his brilliant and harrowing short story “The Depressed Person":

“The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.”

David Foster Wallace on Depression and Powerlessness

From a very early, as-of-yet uncollected short story "The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing". He's writing about depression (i.e. the Bad Thing), but one could almost substitute "sin" for "bad thing". As we all know, it is easy to cling to human agency and willpower when it comes to less significant problems. But depression (or anger or addiction for that matter) is not one of them. DFW paints a perfect and frankly rather horrifying picture of man in need of a solution outside of himself:

“Because the Bad Thing [depression] not only attacks you and makes you feel bad and puts you out of commission, it especially attacks and makes you feel bad and puts out of commission precisely those things that are necessary in order for you to fight the Bad Thing, to maybe get better, to stay alive. This is hard to understand but it's really true. Imagine a really painful disease that, say, attacked your legs and your throat and resulted in a really bad pain and paralysis and all·around agony in these areas. The disease would be bad enough, obviously, but the disease would also be open·ended; you wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Your legs would be all paralyzed and would hurt like hell ... but you wouldn't be able to run for help for those poor legs, just exactly because your legs would be too sick for you to run anywhere at all. Your throat would burn like crazy and you'd think it was just going to explode ... but you wouldn't be able to call out to any doctors or anyone for help, precisely because your throat would be too sick for you to do so. This is the way the Bad Thing works: it's especially good at attacking your defense mechanisms. The way to fight against or get away from the Bad Thing is clearly just to think differently, to reason and argue with yourself. Just to change the way you're perceiving and sensing and processing stuff. But you need your mind to do this, your brain cells with their atoms and your mental powers and all that, your self. And that's exactly what the Bad Thing has made too sick to work right. That's exactly what it has made sick. It's made you sick in just such a way that you can't get better. And you start thinking about this pretty vicious situation, and you say to yourself, 'Boy oh boy, how the heck is the Bad Thing able to do this?' You think about it - really hard, since it's in your best interests to do so - and then all of a sudden it sort of dawns on you... that the Bad Thing is able to do this to you because you're the Bad Thing yourself! The Bad Thing is you. Nothing else: no bacteriological infection or having gotten conked on the head with a board or a mallet when you were a little kid, or any other excuse; you are the sickness yourself. It is what 'defines' you. You realize all this, here. And that, I guess, is when if you're all glib you realize that there is no surface to the water, or when you bonk your nose on the jar's glass and realize you're trapped, or when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face."

Another Week Ends: DFW, A. Null, female Atheists, Big Love and Twin Peaks

1. The New Yorker published a posthumous short story from David Foster Wallace this past week, "All That". A touching look at childhood and the 'religious impulse', it is sort of a must-read. The ending is particularly moving.

2. An illuminating interview with friend/theologian Ashley Null over at VirtueOnline about a number of subjects, including the English Reformation, contemporary Anglicanism and modern American culture (trust me, it's more interesting than it sounds...). His distinction between unconditional affirmation and unconditional love strikes me as pertinent to some of the recent discussions on this site re: love & faith (ht TB).

3. An interesting editorial from USA Today about the need for kinder, gentler - female - Atheists (ht JS).

4. In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of Big Love (1/10/10) - one of our favorites here - HBO has posted "A Juniper Creek Christmas", which has Roman Grant (the amazing Harry Dean Stanton) and company giving a few well-known carols their own unique perspective. For example, "We Three Kings" becomes - you guessed it - "We Three Wives". Just don't tell this guy (ht VH).

5. On a related cult-TV note, The A/V Club recently reminded me of what has to be the most Mbird-friendly Twin Peaks clip:

6. Finally, I am pleased to report that as of this week every post on this site (974 to be exact) has officially been tagged. You can browse via author or subject using the labels at the bottom of the sidebar. Enjoy!

More David Foster Wallace quotes

In the WSJ, adapted from a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College.

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real -- you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

David Foster Wallace

I was gutted to find out that my favorite living author, David Foster Wallace, committed suicide this past Friday. He was 46. This is a real tragedy and a serious loss. His gifts were enormous, perhaps even genius-level. It didn't matter what subject caught his interest - tennis or cruise lines or depression or talk radio or addiction or math - he imbued them all with the same dazzling insight and wisdom and humor. I credit his book Infinite Jest with getting me through my year abroad in Vienna.

Everything he published is fantastic, but if you're a newcomer, I suggest you start with his book of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, then move on to the short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and then attempt Infinite Jest. And stick with it - you won't be sorry.

Here's a small excerpt from an essay he wrote about Dostoevsky, found in the collection Consider The Lobster. It by no means does him justice, but it's relevant:

"Is it possible really to love other people? If I'm lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief - I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn't a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else's needs that I can't even feel directly? And yet if I can't do this, I'm damned to loneliness, which I definitely don't want... so I'm back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons. Is there any way out of this bind?"