DFW Commencement Speech

 A piece of Wallace’s Commencement Speech that struck me was the line: “blind certainty, a closed-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up”.  Even though most wouldn’t care to admit it, we are all naturally self-centered.  I have to agree with this because even though this idea is “socially repulsive” it is completely true.  All of our experiences revolve around the person experiencing them.  As Wallace alleged, there is not an occurrence in my life that didn’t have something to do with me.  When I read this I was relieved to know that in the grand scheme of things, we are all guilty of selfishness, but at the same time this bothered me. 

After being taught what to think in high school, I’ve looked forward to stepping into a liberal arts education that will teach me how to think or to see things using different perspectives.  However, I was not expecting to be looking at things that have since been so utterly obvious to me, and seeing them through another person’s eyes.  More importantly, it is not just bout seeing things from another perspective, it is about appreciating that your opinion is not the only correct one, or the only one that matters, and using the liberal arts education to make life less dreary and repetitive. 

I believe that the best example Wallace gave on this knowledge is the supermarket scenario.   When we are in a place we don’t necessarily enjoy, or we’ve had a bad day, the world and everyone in it seems that much more grotesque and awful.  These feelings can be turned into gratitude and appreciation simply by looking at the world from another person’s point of view.  The only problem is that our natural feelings are so “immediate, urgent, real” that in order to make this happen we have to chose to think a different way.  We know how to think this way, we just have to decide to do it, which may sound easy but at times can be a daunting task.

All things considered, the goal of a liberal arts education is not only to teach us how to think about things that would normally be so obvious to us in ways that we would not have pondered otherwise, but to teach us to chose to do it in everyday circumstances rather than just in the professional world.  We need to be able to do this because in our adult lives we will encounter countless mundane and mind-numbing routines, and if we don’t know how to think about the events in our lives from other people’s point of view, and learn to appreciate opinions that differ from our own, we will be forced to dwell in our boredom and lack of fulfillment until we die.