The Pale King and that Kenyon commencement speech

This little tidbit at the end of this look back at David Foster Wallace’s career gives me hope for The Pale King, the forthcoming (and posthumous and unfinished) novel by Wallace.

Pressed for more details, Pietsch cites a commencement speech that Wallace gave at Kenyon University in 2005, which he says is “very much a distillation” of the novel’s material. “The really important kind of freedom,” said Wallace, “involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, 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.”

I loves me that commencement speech.

• books
• David Foster Wallace
• The Pale King