LEARNING HOW TO CHOOSE HOW AND WHAT YOU THINK.

LEARNING HOW TO CHOOSE HOW AND WHAT YOU THINK. After David Foster Wallace’s tragic suicide, the Wall Street Journal reprinted much of his commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005. One of the points that Wallace made was that: “[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” He suggests that a liberal arts education is a good way to deal with boredom because it teaches you to think interesting thoughts. I think his examples indicate that he does not have in mind the kind of languorous ennui that is found in Chekhov. Rather, he seems to be talking about frustration—the kind of frustration that results from being delayed in doing things we really want to do—traffic delays and chores like grocery shopping. He emphasizes that this kind of thing is inevitable—now that we don’t have personal servants—and that we have to prepare to live with it. Wallace also suggests that the value of a college education is that it enables us to empathize with others and thereby avoid frustration. He says that because of a college education: “I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.” It is interesting that for Wallace, developing empathy is difficult and complicated, requiring years of education.