Making Sense of Making Sense of it All: Some final thoughts

Around the third week of my first year at college, one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, committed suicide. I was a frightened, pasty 18 year old, and the reality of college had yet to soak in. When I heard of his death, it felt as though a favorite teacher had died, a teacher I’d never met. It’s a fierce, heavy feeling to learn that someone you admire so strongly found it necessary to end it all.

A few years before his death, Wallace gave a speech to the graduating class of Kenyon College. The speech was about living a compassionate life. In light of his suicide, I obsessed over this speech, obsessing over understanding how a man devoted to unraveling the intricacies of a fulfilled life felt it unbearable to live a moment longer. I soon discovered there weren’t any answers to be found in his speech. But there were, on the other hand, a multitude of lessons as to how to strive to be fulfilled and compassionate throughout one’s life. He didn’t have a system. What he had were thoughts on how one could make it their life’s journey to be a good person. It was, in part, a manifesto on how to be good for the sake of being good, and not for any self-interested reasons.

What Wallace concluded is that living compassionately requires you to keep the “truth up front in daily consciousness.” Now, to be sure, this is vague and abstract. But Wallace elaborated, saying that grasping this truth requires freedom. As he wrote, “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 unsexy ways, every day.” The alternative, Wallace thought, is “unconsciousness, the default setting, the ‘rate race’—the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

It appears as though Wallace lost that truth, and ever since his death I’ve been consumed with the inscrutable question of what’s good and what won’t kill you before you’ve found some sort of answer to this question that satisfies you – because it’s incredibly easy to be subsumed by the meaninglessness and triviality of modern America. Specifically, it’s terribly difficult to sustain awareness and mental health while being bombarded with advertising, the media, fortune cookie philosophies and the Ice Capades. Wallace believed the effectiveness of belief systems was that worshipping anything else will basically pollute your soul. I don’t think he’s too far off in this conclusion.

But Wallace also believed the liberal arts education is uniquely suited to ready young people for compassionate awareness within the “day-to-day trenches of adult life.” He asserted that a college education “has nothing to do with grades or degrees and everything to do with simple awareness.” Awareness of the beating heart that rests within those we ignore every day. If you can do this, Wallace believed, “It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.”

In the end, there won’t be any earth-shattering answer that’ll push you to ubiquitous happiness or compassion. It’s hard. A majestic hymn won’t ring in your ears, sounding out across time and space the meaning and purpose of existence. It’d be nice if it was easy, or so we may think, living in this place and time of difficulty and confusion. But we aren’t geared for that sort of existence. What we are geared up for is some sort of compassionate existence that causes us to have the insatiable need to help other people. This requires sacrifice. But as far as I can see, the meaning behind sacrifice, and in turn the meaning behind existence, is to make it so that it isn’t sacrifice—so that it’s natural.