Cardgrrl pointed me to a lovely commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College in Ohio by one of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace. His subsequent suicide makes the message all the more poignant.
You might want to read the whole thing: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.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080213082423/http:/www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html
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2 comments:
Very cool speech. Thanks for sharing.
Chilling when he speaks of suicides being 'already dead'.
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