This Is Water
“Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If 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. It’s the truth. Worship 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. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”
-David Foster Wallace
After finishing The Pale King, I felt an emptiness in the place where I held high expectations to DFW. This was obviously unfair since the novel was never finished. This is the price you pay for worshipping any one person or thing. But after re-reading some of his essays and this, from which the above is quoted, I cannot understate the importance of his ideas. You get the sense that, like most important authors, he is writing in attempt to wrestle with the demons of the world, not just his own. To me, this excerpt illustrates the thing many of us have internalized without being able to explain it. We have all tried to justify the worship of both grand and mundane things without acknowledging our hypocrisy.
“Worship 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. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.”
It all comes down to honesty. How honest are you with yourself? I may struggle miserably in trying to embody a paltry 1% of the advice being offered in hopes that by merely trying I am allowed a greater sense of consciousness. So yes, we all worship something; we all practice some variation of faith. DFW manages to justify the kind of faith many “intelligent” people would likely scoff at. My personal reconciliation? I tend to put more faith in questions, and less in answers. This is how I plan to “Keep Swimming”.
