Reading this again, for the upteenth time, I'm struck by how much of David Foster Wallace's work had simple mores and cliches but expressed in such a high brow

Reading this again, for the upteenth time, I'm struck by how much of David Foster Wallace's work had simple mores and cliches but expressed in such a high brow way so as to not feel silly. Infinite Jest, which I read at 19, felt so significant because he managed to say something very trite and cliche in such a powerful way. Quote: """ Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious. """ I highly recommend the film version of "Interviews with Hideous Men" (directed by John Krasinski of all people). It captures the inner, quiet desperation of people in the 21st century.