This would explain why every conversation about the "top ten (insert superlative here)" anything always generates contributions that some participants consider extreme long shots, and why such conversations often degenerate into bickering about the basis for judging whether something is or is not among the top ten (insert superlative here) X, Y or Z. We are, essentially, making it up as we go along.
I do not, therefore, have a list of my top ten favorite books. I have a reliable list of books that I buy/recommend/give, depending on the recipient. "Harriet the Spy" has been given to many ten-year-olds of my acquaintance. Several of my brothers and one boyfriend have all gotten copies of "The Things They Carried," and I have given so many copies of "The Blind Assassin", I should probably buy the things by the case.
Predictably, I am very fond of "Pride and Prejudice," although I am terminally over-exposed to all things Austen right now, and have a bit of a literary ice cream headache where she is concerned. I read "Bleak House" last year and readily admit that it is a triumph and then some.
However, there are just two books that have earned an unshakable place in my heart, both for the same reason: I find myself forgetting that they were books and not people I once met. The first is "Whites," a collection of short stories by Norman Rush. The second is "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace.
I know IJ is a tough slog. In a long series of "brilliant novels by new writers," it is a much harder read than Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" or Mark Leyner's "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist," much less the breakthrough works of Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer or Zadie Smith or... well, you get the idea.
I have stopped recommending it to people and I have abandoned all hope of MG ever getting past the first twenty pages. If you're thinking of giving it a shot, I will offer the following advice: Get through the first two hundred pages, then decide whether to give up or not.
Maybe I am the only person who, years after reading IJ, frequently forgets that she doesn't actually know six recovering addicts from a halfway house in Boston. But something about DFW's writing blurs the line between thinking and experiencing. I have never -- could never -- meet Don Gately, and yet I feel like I could recognize his Prince Valiant haircut from across a crowded room.
All this is preamble to this link, from a commencement speech given by DFW in the spring of 2005. (I found it through Jackie Danicki's blog, which is a comforting blend of travelogue, diary and beauty advice.)
Like his best fiction, DFW's address seems like something you're thinking yourself, except, of course, you're not. Here's my favorite part:
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...
...Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
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