EXTRApolation #1
(Extrapolation on Getting Situated) … I’m having a hard time convincing myself that throwing myself into graduate school for a year is anything more than succumbing to another form of mental entrapment framed by a well-oiled institution-machine. A set stage. Keep pushing on and you’ll find Happiness/Money, wittle yourself down to an Individual, and be sure to perform and eventually recycle the same 10 activities, rituals, cleanses, hobbies, tics, masks, trains of thought — and even less roles and physical functions. Your mood shall be defined by anxious migraines and anorexia that somehow makes you smug. You will be unfulfilled and you will sit on your hands, or make another cup of coffee. You and another Individual swear to latch onto each other so you can fit into society real snug and spend $$$ to eat out and peacock while making each other sick; you’ll learn to tolerate compromise and tell yourself it’s O.K. You’ll wonder why you never “ran away” from the rat race, or rather, the laboratory’s maze. You’ll remember wanting to build anything and being able to. And still being able to. And still being able to. And you sit. Some more. And drink. At the same places. And listen to your brain die in the dark in a place that may not even feel like Home — because Living is so not concrete.
My friend Andy sent me this video of David Foster Wallace reading his essay “This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life” in response to my existential (de)construction of my fears and doubts. My mental fortress (a pillow fort of paranoia if it were tangible) conjured memories from undergrad: this is water thinly tattooed on the pale collar bones of Western-Critical-Theory-worshipping boys… but after shaking my skepticism (we were all eager-minded, soft-skinned blank slates back then) and hearing the piece for the first time, I found solace in David’s final statements:
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. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
And there is nothing I cherish more than my Freedom.
Image: Barbara Barg, “Commentary”