In an email newsletter today, I got a link to author David Foster Wallace’s commencement address at Kenyon University in May 2005. It’s a nice New Year’s read, the time of year where everyone is thinking about resolutions and self-improvement and so on.
It’s about how we are hard-wired to see ourselves as the center of the uinverse, because in fact we are the center of our own universe, per our own experience and point of reference. And it’s about how difficult it is to break out of that “default setting,” as he calls it. I’ve never read any of Wallace’s work before, but I think I will have to add him to the list of people to read.
Be warned, its long. If you don’t have the time, come back to it later. Here’s the link:
http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html