David Foster Wallace, in a commencement speech, This is Water, observed this:
“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…
He goes on to relate that
“…if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: the only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.”
His point is that in any given situation, you can choose to think about the world in a cynical, frustrated, default setting that, he elsewhere observes as “literally self-centered.” I’ve always found this speech to be sad and helpful at the same time. But the elements of foreshadowing contained within are not the point. Rather, the point is that Wallace observes that one of our primary freedoms is that you and I can pick what we “choose to pay attention to” and how we “construct meaning from experience.” This notion is so trivially true that we often forget it and allow our moment by moment experiences of dull tedium and frustration overwhelm us.
Anyway, I was listening to his speech in order to get ready for a class discussion over it for some rhetoric students when I heard this song by Modest Mouse (there is an explicit lyric contained within):
Though as far as I know, the song writer of Modest Mouse is an atheist, he manages to find ways to construct positive meaning from the world despite some of the horrors contained within.
“The world’s an inventor
With its work crawling, running, squirming ’round
Trees drop colorful fruits
Directly into our mouths
The world’s an inventor
We’re the dirtiest thing it’s thought about
And we really don’t mind”
Then when the next verse come around:
The world composes
With his shirttails wrinkled, hanging out
Bang us together
See what sort of sounds we make right now
The world plays music
Playing skin on teeth inside of the mouth
What sort of sounds?
What lovely sounds come about?
The narrator tends to see, in the chaos and privation within the world, a composition of joy and abundance. It would seem, from other songs on the same album and in their previous work, that at least one member of Modest Mouse attempts to choose (at least for song writing purposes) to view the world from an optimistic and intentionally unselfish point of view (see Float On and Dashboard).
Anyway, Wallace’s speech and the Modest Mouse song have tremendous overlap with two older authors. One is Thomas Traherne in the 7th meditation of his Centuries of Meditations:
To contemn the world and to enjoy the world are things contrary to each other. How then can we contemn the world, which we are born to enjoy? Truly there are two worlds. One was made by God, the other by men. That made by God was great and beautiful. Before the Fall it was Adam’s joy and the Temple of his Glory. That made by men is a Babel of Confusions: Invented Riches, Pomps and Vanities, brought in by Sin. Give all (saith Thomas a Kempis) for all. Leave the one that you may enjoy the other. Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, ed. Bertram Dobell (London: P. J. & A. E. Dobell, 1927), 6.
He observes that in the world in which we live there are two worlds. The world as it is meant to be, filled to the brim with the glories and beauties of God and secondly, the world as made by man: a world where nature red in tooth and claw viciously obscures all beauty and virtue from sight and where those who are created to observe, enjoy, and emulate virtue are tempted instead to despair.
Similarly, Paul the apostle says this:
The mindset of the flesh is death, but the mindset of the Spirit is life and peace. (Romans 8:6 author’s translation)
Essentially, the idea is that our initial perception of what the world is and the deleterious effects that perception has on our emotions, motivations, and actions could be wrong. And in fact, there is a different way to look at things. This issue is dealt with throughout the New Testament, but Paul’s most concise treatment is above (also see 2 Corinthians 4:1-6:2).
The similarities that Paul and Traherne share with Wallace are that they all perceive that being freed from selfishness will make you truly happy. All three of them also recommend approaching this by intentionally changing perspective as we go through life. The difference is that Paul and Traherne perceive this to be an exercise based upon more than merely the brute fact that you and I can choose to dwell upon what we will. Paul and Traherne also depend upon the reality that creation is from a good and beautiful God, no matter how ugly and distorted it can be.
In other words, for them the difficult work of “constructing meaning” out of reality is ultimately fruitful because there is a meaning to be discovered. For Wallace, the freedom to choose is its own justification for choosing not to be so selfish and to re-imagine the world as a better place. For a natural cynic like myself, such an exercise would be soul crushing if at the back of it all I thought, “too bad this is all just an effort not to succumb to the futility of it all.”
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