david foster wallace or being aware

I sporadically have trysts with McSweeney's Internet Tendency which is a kind of multi-faceted literary thing. For a physical representation: Imagine there's a store (there is) in San Fransisco (826 Valencia) that's full of witty pirate memorabilia, mop heads that will fall on your head (I got mopped), and tutors for children. Now imagine a website like that. 

In 2008 when David Foster Wallace committed suicide McSweeney's began posting rememberances from people who had been affected by him. He was an author and a professor and I had never heard of him before. But these letters written by people who had taken classes from him or who knew him moved me. 

It is ever miraculous to me that it does not take a face to face, consistent, traditional relationship with a person to be changed.

In the ensuing years I have read some of his works (not nearly as much as I'd like, say, a book-or-two-full) and read more of him and I am ever more grateful for his life. I've really been wanting to start a series of profiles on MY friends, people I know in REAL LIFE and the great things they're doing, but here's a last testimony to a stranger. A Collection of..., that one blog, posted about this talk given by Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005. I highly recommend it. For a taste, the already highlighted, large-print quote from this speech is:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

I would enjoy your thoughts and discussions on this whether they be in in person or by technological means.