There is quite the ballyhoo about today’s big commencement address in South Bend; after all the build up, it will be fascinating to hear what the president says.
At the risk of civil blasphemy, though, I don’t think Obama’s speech will touch this one by the late David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005. The speech is about the narrows lenses through which we view the world and the constant readjustment of those lenses that is life. Wallace addresses belief specifically and I am not alone in reading a Buddhist subtext throughout, particularly the understanding of mindfulness and suffering.
The address has been published recently as a book called “This is Water.” Here’s an excerpt: “This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship. Because here’s something else that’s weird but 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 the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”
It closes: “The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: `This is water.'”
