Looking for a gift for a friend, I tripped over a small booklet by novelist David Foster Wallace titled This Is Water<\/em>.<\/p>\n I\u2019m quite late to the game here. The volume is an only slightly cleaned up transcript of a commencement address Wallace delivered to Kenyon College in 2005 and \u201cwent viral\u201d on the Internet long before we had a term for it. Wallace killed himself in 2008 and This Is Water<\/em> was published posthumously.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a morbid interest of mine to see what writerly suicides had to say about ending it before they ended it. \u201cNo I don\u2019t have a gun,\u201d sang Kurt Cobain, but it turns out he did.<\/p>\n In the Kenyon speech, Wallace speaks of suicide. It is hardly a coincidence, he said, that most \u201cadults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.\u201d (Though when the time came, he personally reached for the noose.)<\/p>\n Wallace used suicide as a pivot, telling the students that the \u201creal, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t suggest religion as a remedy, but he came close, telling the crowd \u201cthere is actually no such thing as atheism\u201d in a practical sense. \u201cEverybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.\u201d<\/p>\n He nudged them further. \u201cThe compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship\u2013be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths<\/a>, or some inviolable set of ethical principles,\u201d he said, \u201cis that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.\u201d<\/p>\n Exhibit A: \u201cIf you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.\u201d<\/p>\n Exhibit B: \u201cWorship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.\u201d <\/p>\n Exhibit C: \u201cWorship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.\u201d<\/p>\n Exhibit D: \u201cWorship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s more but, as I said, I\u2019m late to this. Very well done and sad to digest this only after Wallace, a life-long severe depressive, finally chucked it all. You can read a transcript here<\/a> or there\u2019s always YouTube:<\/p>\n