=life, it seems is a great struggle to escape yourself=

Last night you came across a Juan Ramon Jimenez poem translated by Robert Bly:

I am not I. 

                   I am this one 

walking beside me whom I do not see, 

whom at times I manage to visit, 

and whom at other times I forget; 

who remains calm and silent while I talk, 

and forgives, gently, when I hate, 

who walks where I am not, 

who will remain standing when I die.

You feel like this, too. This person you see walking, talking, fucking up their way through life…you're as disappointed & exasperated with her as anyone else. But more often than not, you don't seem to be able to do anything about her behavior, leaving you to conclude: You are not that person. 

But who are you?

Last night, depressed, you were watching David Foster Wallace videos on Youtube. You can't remember what led you to him, probably something to do with the fact that he belongs to the Suicide Club, which you've long thought about joining. H was out to dinner with the guys, so you were alone. You washed your hair, painted your nails, sat on the bed, and watched David Foster Wallace being interviewed by Charlie Rose. It was an interview from 20 years ago, before David Foster Wallace decided to hang himself in his garage at the peak of his fame. 

He was asked about his depression, his drug abuse, his—at that time—unsuccessful suicide attempts. He said that he didn't like talking about that stuff. Not because he was embarrassed about  it, but because it was so normal, so average, & therefore so uninteresting. He said everyone had those feelings, everyone had their own private shitstorm to weather, their own feelings of insecurity, unworth, black despair. He's right, but still you wondered if he was right…just because we all have those feelings doesn't necessarily make it uninteresting so much as universal & isn't what's universal what a writer should be addressing? The very stuff we all share, but don't often talk about? But it seems to you that was part of David Foster Wallace's point. Everyone, these days, is talking and talking and writing and writing about their depression, their abuse, their addiction, their victimization….it's no longer a deep dark secret we share. It's already out in the open. Is it necessary to keep on disclosing these facts? Don't we all get it by now? Hasn't it become somewhat boring? Yes, he's right, you think. It's time to talk about something else. But what? 

He spoke about having achieved fame early and, in his view, somewhat undeservedly in life. How disillusioning his success turned out to be…how profoundly depressing. He'd grabbed the brass ring most of us continue chasing all through our lives, often without ever reaching, and found it didn't make him happy. In his twenties, he discovered what everyone else usually doesn't discover until their fifties…if at all. That achieving one's goals doesn't lead to happiness. What does lead to happiness then? David Foster Wallace hadn't an answer yet. Maybe, he implied, the person who never reaches his or her goal is luckier than the person who does.  Easy for him to say, right? But the person who never succeeds can continue to live under the illusion that something will make her happy. The person who succeeds lives with the bitter certainty that possibly nothing can. 

Later, I watched—or rather listened to—David Foster Wallace's now famous Kenyon College commencement address, "This is Water." Here he seemed to have an answer to the question he couldn't answer ten years earlier. He talked about what having an education really means. It's not about being smart or having all the facts at one's intellectual fingertips. It means learning how to think. And learning how to think means overriding what he calls our "default mode," which is basically "not thinking" at all, but simply riding along through life half-consciously by automatic pilot, i.e.. all our preconceived, unexamined notions of life, of people, what's right, what's wrong, etc. Part of this unconscious, unexamined way of living, he points out, is the self-evident sense that we are at the center of the universe ("I don't mind dying," Ayn Rand said in a documentary you saw the night before last, "because when I end the world ends, too), locked away in the inviolate citadel of our skulls. He noted that when people commit suicide by gun they almost always shoot themselves in the head (Van Gogh, for one, didn't, but shot himself in the chest, aiming perhaps for the heart) quite possibly because that's where they feel imprisoned. 

An hour or so before, you'd been thinking, not for the first time, that if you walked into a room and saw a loaded gun lying on a table and no one around, there is a good chance you might, on impulse, because the impulse to do away with yourself is always there, pick it up, place the barrel in your mouth, and pull the trigger. (But, for the first time in your life, you also thought you wouldn't commit suicide, not without warning, because you couldn't bear to hurt H that way…and you realized this is the first time you felt a responsibility to others vis-a-vis suicide, which you always considered—and still do—an individual's absolute right, because H is the first person you've ever felt really loved you. This is how you know you are loved. You can imagine that your suicide would truly hurt someone else. It's somewhat shocking to realize this is the first time you've felt that way…rather, it should be shocking, and sad, too, if you weren't so inured to shock, and sadness, by now, having understood that you'd never really been loved by anyone before. David Foster Wallace concluded that the goal of life—if life could have a goal—was to live consciously, to examine preconceptions, to step out of the bone enclave of one's own skull and enter the world, a world outside yourself, full of other people struggling, suffering, and often trapped inside their own skulls, thinking they, too, are the center of the universe. 

"This is water," he said. 

"This is water," you said, touching the tears that came to your eyes.