I keep thinking about commencement addresses, apparently -- mine, Gaiman's, and now David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water," his 2005 address to the graduates at Kenyon College.
There is a lovely 9 minute film adaptation of DFW's address available below. I assign it to students and watch it regularly myself. I think it is a really valuable investment of their and my time. It makes me weepy every time I watch it, by the way.
Here are some key points in DFW's remarks:
It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head.
Learning how to think 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.
If you really learn how to pay attention, it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline.
The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
The real value of a real education has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time.
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.
---------
I think this is where making art comes in.
Making art on a regular basis requires me --
to stay alert and attentive;
to consciously choose what I am paying attention to and how I construct meaning from it;
to look for the sacred in the mundane, for the love, the fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down;
to be aware in a disciplined way;
to step out of the rat race and consciously seek some infinite thing;
to look for what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time;
to do the daunting work of staying conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.
Making art in a disciplined way, then, is a lifelong education in staying alert, attentive, and aware -- and it keeps me from getting hosed.