Great and Terrible Truths -
David Foster Wallace’s address at Kenyon College was funny, warm — and unmistakably dark
Pic of David Foster Wallace bySuzy Allman for The New York Times

By TOM BISSELL
Published New York Times , April 24, 2009

In the autumn of 2005, an e-mail message with the unpromising subject header “Thought you’d like this!!!” landed in my in-box. The sender, a family friend, was an incurable forwarder of two-year-old John Kerry jokes, alerts for non­existent computer viruses and poetry about strangers who turn out to be Jesus. This latest offering contained not the expected link to a YouTube video of yawning kittens but several dozen paragraphs of unsigned, chaotically formatted text. It bore this title: “Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address — May 21, 2005.” Before I had reached the end of the first paragraph I believed I could identify the author. A quick search verified it: The commencement speaker for Kenyon College’s graduating class of 2005 was, indeed, David Foster Wallace.
Transcription of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address (marginalia.org)

The novelist Richard Ford spoke at my college graduation; 13 years later, I can recall precisely nothing of what he said. Which does not mean it was bad. The commencement address — not quite an essay, more intimate than a speech — is a highly particular literary form. It is also a uniquely disposable one. Imagine you have written the greatest commencement address in history. What do you do with it, once it has been delivered? The answer: nothing. I wrote a rather nice one a few years ago for the graduating class of my hometown community college. Would anyone like to read it? I suspected as much. When the graduation caps are thrown into the air, the commencement address’s only obvious utility is jettisoned along with them.

Wallace’s address managed to avoid this fate not because it was great (though it was). He never published it and probably never would have. The address was saved, rather, thanks to the enterprising soul who transcribed it from video and posted it on the Internet, where, somehow, it came to the attention of my family friend — who would not have known David Foster Wallace if he fell on her. Thanks to the enthusiasm of people like her, and the magic of the cut-and-paste function, the address became a small sensation and must now rank high among the most widely read things Wallace ever wrote.

Wallace was often accused, even by his admirers, of having a weakness for what Nabokov once referred to as “the doubtful splendors of virtuosity.” Standing before the graduates of Kenyon College, Wallace opted for a tonal simplicity only occasionally evident in the hedge mazes of his fiction. He spoke about the difficulty of empathy (“Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of”), the importance of being well adjusted (“which I suggest to you is not an accidental term”) and the essential lonesomeness of adult life (“lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation”). Truthful, funny and unflaggingly warm, the address was obviously the work of a wise and very kind man. At the edges, though, there was something else — the faint but unmistakable sense that Wallace had passed through considerable darkness, some of which still clung to him, but here he was, today, having beaten it, having made it through.

I knew Dave Wallace well enough to have responded to the news of his suicide, in September 2008, with overwhelming grief, though I did not know him nearly well enough to have had any knowledge of his decades of depression. In my shock I sought refuge in the only oasis I could find: his work.

Read the full piece at NYT.