The Pale King

Never the biggest fan of public appearances — especially those which emphasized his importance—David Foster Wallace nonetheless accepted an invitation to deliver the 2005 commencement speech for Kenyon College. Much of Wallace’s work circles uneasily around the knowledge that simple, homespun cliches are actually meaningful and important once you scrape away the smug label of “common sense” obscuring what’s actually being said.“How do trite things get to be trite?” recovering addict Don Gately wonders in Infinite Jest. “Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti- interesting?” It’s a problem Wallace reiterated in an interview with Salon while promoting the book: “All the things that my parents said to me, like ‘It’s really important not to lie.’ OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don’t feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you[...] I’m in pain, I’m nervous, I’m lonely and I can’t figure out why. Then I realize, ‘Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie.’ The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting [...] can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important.”

via Too Little, Too Soon: David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” – BOMBLog.