From a commencement address by the late David Foster Wallace at Kenyon University, May 21, 2005:
There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too. [...]
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 quote 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.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about. [...]
The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
Full speech here.
And then the religious guy says that God was working through the Eskimos. The joke doesn't work at all.
Just sad. Infinite Jest is one of my favorites!
That was probably one of the Truest, most insightful speeches I've ever read. And I really hope people don't discredit it now because of his death. I never met the man but based on this 'sermon' if you will, I have faith he was about as caring as anybody on this planet. And life can be torturous for those who care. It's sort of like something I heard somewhere... a man who lives to his fullest everyday must have no concept of the past or future. And the wise man is never in the now. It's a balancing act, having to think and live. I think David's speech gets to the heart of that ongoing, struggled balance.
Raymond: You're right, the joke doesn't work if you continue it beyond where it ends. ("So, what did the chicken do when it got to the other side of the road?") The joke ends where it ends -- two ways of looking at the world bumping heads. That's the punch line.
Emerson, I can only imagine why you chose that bit to post, but my imaginings don't reflect well on you- especially considering you posted it completely out of context, and DFW told that story in order to demonstrate how wrong it was to be certain of EITHER thing, be it that God was responsible for the man's being rescued, or that he wasn't. It wouldn't shock me to see you'd missed the point completely or else were just cherrypicking a bit you found congenial to your own (arrogantly held and argued) beliefs. Of course it's disrespectful to the man to quote a paragraph of his wonderful commencement address out of context in order to make a point he himself did not, and indeed would not, make. But, there you go. Yet another example of why David Foster Wallace was David Foster Wallace, while Jim Emerson is Jim Emerson.
Thank you for posting this.
Jim,
The commencement speech as a whole is excellent but I don't think the joke works outside of the context. More specifically I don't think the joke is representative of the speech as a whole and may actually give people a false impression of what it's about. That's unfortunate since the speech is well worth reading. (Admittedly I'm not sure any isolated quote could capture the speech... but there is little indication given here of what the speech is actually about.) My initial instinctive reaction to the quote outside the context was similar to Raymond's above. Outside of the speech one might be tempted to think this is just another backhanded Christian joke (A dose of Anti-Maher to wash down Religious perhaps). Likely, in part because of its resemblance to the ubiquitous (and false) assumption that everyone in times of desperation is ultimately a theist. Worse still many Calvinists among others use this and other false assumptions to argue that all atheists are inherently inconsistent given these assumptions. (I had never heard of David Foster Wallace before so I had little reason to suspect otherwise.)
The film Touching the Void, in particular, does a nice job of dispelling the notion that all people are theists the moment before they're faced with certain doom. So should the existence of a major atheistic religion like Buddhism whose advanced practitioners can undergo extreme torture without abandoning atheism.
But Wallace, of course, was not using that joke in that way at all. The speech is far more interesting than that. The only reason I pursued it further is because some of my friends also mourned his passing which sparked my curiosity as to who this guy was. Only after learning more about him was I interested in reading his version of a commencement speech. I'm glad I did as it's easily one of the best and most ambitious commencement speeches I've seen. I highly recommend people read it. I just wish you would do more to sell it for what it is.
Oh, that was a joke? Sounded like a sermon.
Paul: What arrogance. You belabor the obvious, and insult all readers with your ad hominem spin. If you understand the quotation, as quoted, why do you assume I (or any other readers) don't? I posted it without comment, because it's patently obvious that the uncertainty -- the collision of world-views, as I said in an earlier comment -- IS what DFW was getting at. And, if you didn't get it from what he said, I provided a link to the entire speech. Your straw man argument reveals your own superficial assumptions, not mine. DFW's words -- as excerpted and in the context of the speech itself -- speak for themselves. They don't need you to misrepresent them by misrepresenting my motives in quoting them.
Jim, I was familier with the commencement address before you posted it, and quite a fan of it. I hope you'll pardon me if I don't believe you posted it for the reason you claim to have posted it. If it had ended somehow with the Christian getting the punch line, I don't think you'd have used this excerpt.
You've written enough online that an attentive (and perhaps even an inattentive) reader is able to give an educated guess as to your purposes in posting. It's misrepresentative of the speech and of Wallace, but it somehow tied him to your own arrogantly held beliefs (though you'd perhaps refer to them as non-beliefs), and played as another small jab at Christianity. You're of course free to claim some other object in posting it, but the attentive reader is free to not believe you.
PS
I'm an atheist.
Paul, Richard: To (I hope) avoid misunderstanding, I added a few more paragraphs from the speech after the jump. Paul: I didn't assume your response to the speech, or my posting of it, was based on your religious beliefs, or mine. Let's just stick to the words that are there, and whatever we may think the writer/speaker was saying rather than speculate on somebody's motives for quoting from the speech.
I think the story works because it overturns the listener's expectations: It's the nonbeliever who uses (speculative) "evidence" to confirm his non-belief exactly the way that believers use often use what they consider to be "answered" prayers to confirm their belief. DFW uses the story to illustrate both characters' certainty. I've never been so foolish as to maintain that evidence or science can prove or disprove belief, or religion, or god, or the supernatural. The nonbeliever is every bit as much the object of his punch line as the religious guy is, but he doesn't know it. That, I thought, was indeed the point. I like the story. If it had been told differently and ended with the religious guy saying something like, "It's a miracle!", it would still have been about the same thing, but wouldn't have been as effective in undercutting the certainty of both characters. I don't think it's a primarily story about tolerance. As Wallace says in his elaboration, he sees it mainly as a story about arrogance and cluelessness. That's the way I took it -- because of the way he told it -- before I'd even read what else he had to say about it.
Let's all make up and acknowledge that Wallace used a commencement speech to propound an ethical system/ approach to living every bit as inspiring and intelligent (and, unfortunately, every bit as difficult to adhere to) as the one Dostoevsky laid out in the Father Zossima chapters of Brothers Karamazov.
He'll be missed, but only if they ban the books.
I thought it played like a jab at religion, too. Your appreciation of the joke was vastly different from mine, and Paul's, and Richard's, and I imagine most people's.
Going in the opposite direction, I think you only needed that first paragraph to expand upon the joke, or story. It's like cinematography. At first you didn't have enough in the frame. Now you have too much.
Jim ... while I don't believe you meant anything malicious or sneaky about your post, and will certainly not resort to the kind of attack Paul made .... I do believe that the intention of your post was completely lost -- at least it was on me.
Color me clueless I guess - but, not knowing anything about Wallace or his speech - and just taking the paragraph you posted entirely on its own merits ... I didn't see any humor or any great point in it at all. It seemed to me like a rather obvious point - and I could tell where it was going all along. The end didn't seem enlightening or humorous or anything. It was just there, as an obvious point a preacher would make.
So, I'm just saying, whatever point you were trying to make -- or whatever you were trying to do to illustrate this man's greatness, or whatever ... just didn't work.
Doesn't make you a bad guy - I'm just sayin' :)
What a Rorschach test this has turned out to be! Here's what happened: I was on a plane all day coming back to Seattle from Toronto. Late that night, after I got home, I turned on my laptop and learned that David Foster Wallace had died. I was in shock. I wanted to acknowledge it, but I didn't feel I was capable of putting together any thoughts of my own at that hour. In searching for a photo of DFW, I came across that commencement speech. It started with a story about two fish. Then he told the story about the two guys in Alaska. I liked that it was a self-contained story (thus easily excerpted) with a twist that made you think about it in more than one way simultaneously. I also thought it made a good follow-up to my reactions to Bill Maher's "Religulous" -- because, as I argued, Maher pretends to be selling doubt when he's really selling an anti-religious certainty that's the equivalent of the religious certainty he's mocking. DFW's story showed a more nuanced, open-ended approach to the same questions in a way that brought a smile to my face. The story/joke is just one element in his speech, and I linked to the whole thing for those who were interested in seeing where he went with it. That worked for some, not for everybody.
I hadn't been watching or reading the daily news so this blog was the first pointer I had to DFW's death. Didn't he write in "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men", -- and I'm paraphrasing badly here -- "Perhaps the unending and desperate search for home is, in fact, our home?" May he rest in peace.
Well, reading up, now I feel like an idiot for not knowing much of anything about Wallace. Especially considering he was born in Ithaca, N.Y. - where I went to school, and which so happens to be one of my favorite places on Earth.
So, I'll just wrap this up by saying thanks to Jim, for - despite this little hiccup of an argument on this page - getting me to explore him further. :)
Anyone who took this post to mean you were taking a jab at Christians -- I don't know where the hell they got that from. The point of that joke seems self-evident to me, but then that is how most jokes work... either you get it and you laugh (or in this case, smile dryly while a few lights come to life in the back of your mind), or you spend several paragraphs explaining why it does or doesn't work. That is surely the worst fate for humor.
I'm a Christian, Paul, and I don't know what the hell you're on about.
It's really sad that an excerpt of DFW's speech at Kenyon, which in its full form is amazing and inspiring, begot a digression into the "he said/she said" version of contemporary American religious politics. To anyone who hasn't read the full speech, please do read it--DFW encourages us to suspend our selfishness, our arrogance, our tendency to assume the worst in others at our weakest, most exhausted, inhospitable moments, and instead, strive consciously to have sympathy and kindness towards each other--and to do so deliberately, with intention and compassion. I have no idea what inner angst and uncertainty pushed DFW to the end of his life, but the world is a bit smaller and meaner without him.
For your enjoyment:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nascar_cancels_remainder_of_season
To me, Wallace simply uses the story to point out that reality is ordered up by interior governing structures that are immensely persuasive and often entirely undetectable to the self. Wallace suggests that we can deepen our sense of reality by attempting to inhabit the perspectives of others, such as the lady in the store or the guy in the gas-guzzling SUV. When we do this, we dis-identify with the self and glimpse what Wallace called the "mystical oneness" of things, clearly a nod to what Buddhists call non-dual reality. If practiced enough, one's awareness or consciousness becomes heightened, making it pretty hard to miss the water.