this contemplative life

I've been contemplating more than musing, largely because the lives of a few of my friends have been moving downward with the market. If you've talked with me for more than twenty minutes, you know that my object of contemplation is the relationship between experience and meaning. There is an undeniably earnest aspect to this quest. I get ironic detachment (who could afford not to under Bush's reign of error?), but part of getting it is sensing its limits.

I've read a lot about David Foster Wallace since his death last year. The latest is a masterful piece in the New Yorker. I learned that Wallace's third and unfinished novel is about a group of IRS employees in Illinois and the possibility of transcendence via boredom.

He left a note about the novel's central idea: “Bliss — a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

For the postmodern and Prozac generation, Wallace was the right messenger for mindfulness. He understood that mindfulness isn't only a tool to keep your cool during terrible traffic, but a way to hold the contradictions of life, to make fun of and revel in the mundane. At some point in paying attention, you start to realize that every experience is equal opportunity: it can be momentous and meaningful or empty and pointless. And that's true not only for you, but for everyone. Irony and absurdity are not lost (contra Judith Warner's lament); they are subsumed. To wit, the setting of Wallace's unfinished novel is IRS POST 047, not Walden Pond.

As Wallace noted at a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, true freedom “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.”

Time to read less about Wallace, and more of him.