WE SIMPLY KNOW SO LITTLE ABOUT HUMAN BEINGS

Yesterday I ignored a phone call from my parents in Paris because I didn't recognize the number.

THIS IS WATER, THIS IS WATER

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.

...

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

--David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College's 2005 commencement speech. Originally found here.

Please, please, read the whole thing.

Basically, we decided it was to combat loneliness.

— Jonathan Franzen on what he and David Foster Wallace decided fiction should be for, from here (new favvy blog!!)

"I DECIDED I WAS GOING TO MARRY YOU IN THE SEVENTH GRADE"

And I dreamt about it again last night.

You know, Avon, you gotta think about what we got in this game for, man. Huh? Was it so our names could ring out on some fucking ghetto streetcorner, man? Naw, man. There's games beyond the fucking game.

--Stringer Bell, The Wire

Today was a Ferragamo day.
And a care package day.
And a lost some chub day.
And a Kat got a laptop with a camera day.
And a Colin and I are going to NYC day.

OUR SAD BEWILDERING LIVES

I’m serious. Is there anything more glorious than a professor? Forget about his molding the minds, the future of a nation — a dubious assertion; there’s little you can do when they tend to emerge from the womb predestined for Grand Theft Auto Vice City. No. What I mean is, a professor is the only person on earth with the power to put a veritable frame around life — not the whole thing, God no — simply a fragment of it, a small wedge. He organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism, imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation, Midterms. All that order — simply divine. The symmetry of a semester course. Consider the word themselves: the seminar, the tutorial, the advanced whatever workshop accessible only to seniors, to graduate fellows, to doctoral candidates, the practicum — what a marvelous word: practicum! You think me crazy. Consider a Kandinsky. Utterly muddled, put a frame around it, voila — looks rather quaint above the fireplace. And so it is with the curriculum. That celestial, sweet set of instructions, culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam. And what is the Final Exam? A test of one’s deepest understanding of giant concepts. No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines — aahh, that’s structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we’re lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian and our sad, bewildering lives.

--Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics