Book Review: This is Water, Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life (2009) by David Foster Wallace.

This isn't water.

This is genius. It's genius in its profound simplicity (or simple profundity).

Writer David Foster Wallace gave only one commencement address. He spoke to the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2005. Since he hung himself in 2008, there regrettably won't be any more. However, it's hard to fathom how he could have improved on this one.

Wallace begins with a story about two young fish swimming one way who encounter an older fish swimming the other direction when the older fish asked the younger, "How's the water?" (p. 3.) A little later, one of the younger fish asks the other, "What['s] water?" (p. 4).

Wallace uses this story to illustrate how one can live unaware of "the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities" and these "are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about." (p. 8.)

Wallace posits that education does (or should) teach one how to think, but in a different sense than most understand this "single most pervasive cliche in the commencement speech genre." (p. 12.)

"The liberal arts mantra of 'teaching one how to think' is really supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have some 'critical awareness' about myself and my certainties....because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded." (p. 33.)

As his core example, Wallace cites the human default setting of self-centeredness. (pp. 36-41.) He suggests that "'[l]earning how to think' really means learning how exercise some control over how and what you think." (p. 53.) Wallace explains that this control comes from choice. (p. 54.) Those who can't or won't exercise this control are doomed, Wallace argues. (p. 55.) Rather shockingly given what happened later, Wallace transitions directly to speaking about those who commit suicide. (pp. 58-59.)

Wallace states that the real value of a liberal arts education is to keep from going through life "unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out." (p. 60.) Wallace submits that in consciously broadening one's horizons and thinking about others, one can develop the compassion and empathy necessarily to living a well-adjusted life. One can also decide what to worship. (p. 98.) Wallace observes: "In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everbody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship." (pp. 98-101).

In so doing, Wallace gets at something far more fundamental than mere head knowledge. He's getting at real learning. In this sense, Wallace's analogy about water really is apt. It's the substance necessary to avoid dehydration and its final result, death. Whether you are in school, out of school, or about to enter school, this book contains a valuable lesson about life to "hydrate" any learning experience. Highly recommended.

Another Dead Hero.

Another hero just ended his life.

At 46, Michael Whitmarsh committed suicide through carbon monoxide inhalation at a friend's house, leaving behind two daughters and a wife.

In addition to Olympic glory (a 1996 silver medalist in beach volleyball), Whitmarsh achieved considerable, sustained success on the pro volleyball tour, garnering 28 titles. At 6-7 he also excelled as a basketball player, starring at one of my alma maters, the University of San Diego, and playing professionally in Germany for three years.

At first blush, one might find it odd why one who breathed such rarefied air would end it all. Few mortals have ever experienced the chorus of praise that Whitmarsh did. However, maybe there is something about those who achieve so highly that they cannot cope when the public adulation wanes (or its effect does). Whitmarsh is now at least the fourth celebrity I'm familiar with who has committed suicide in the last couple of years. The other three are: Brad Delp (Boston lead singer), David Foster Wallace (writer), and Richard Jeni (actor/comic). I'm thinking it's not coincidental.

via: http://www.latimes.com/sports/olympics/la-me-mike-whitmarsh19-2009feb19,0,1619006.story; and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Whitmarsh

Book Review: Everything and More by David Foster Wallace.

Amid complex calculations and intricate graphs, a math history text yearns to emerge. Within that history book, a biography struggles for liberation.

David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Compact History of [Infinity symbol] focuses on mathematical developments in the 1800s, primarily regarding transfinite math.

In this study, Wallace highlights a gentleman who evidently held five names, not including titles: Georg F. L. P. Cantor, born 1845—the “acknowledged father of transfinite math.” (p. 5.)

At the outset, Everything and More acknowledges the difficulty of its task: "The aim is to discuss these achievements in such a way that they’re vivid and comprehensible to readers who do not have pro-grade technical background and expertise. To make the math beautiful—or at least to get the reader to see how someone might find it so. Which of course all sounds very nice, except there’s a hitch: just how technical can the presentation get without either losing the reader or burying her in endless little definitions and explanatory asides[.]” (p. 2.) Wallace explains further that he is not content to have the reader "merely knowing about Cantor’s accomplishments” but “appreciating them”. (p. 7.)

Unfortunately, Wallace does not attain his desired balance of achieving understanding without overloading the reader with technical details. I’m not certain how Wallace defines a “pro-grade technical background and expertise”, but this book’s math is basically accessible only to those with math or engineering degrees or a professional background therein. An example: “Since the cardinal number of denumerable sets is [Hebrew letter with numerical subset], it looks as if it would make sense to signify the set of all reals’ cardinality by [Hebrew letter with numerical subset]; but for complicated reasons Cantor designates this set’s cardinal number c, which he also calls ‘the power of the Continuum,’ since it turns out to be the nondenumerability of the reals that accounts for the continuity of the Real Line. What this means is that the [infinity symbol] of points involved in continuity is greater than the [infinity symbol] of points comprised by any discrete sequence, even an infinitely dense one.” (pp. 257-58.)

However, Everything and More’s historical and biographical aspects may be accessed by those who don’t possess technical expertise. These parts also contain interesting revelations, especially as they relate to Cantor. He, for example, “was in and out of mental hospitals for much of his later adulthood and died in a sanitarium in Halle [footnote omitted] in 1918.” (p. 5.) Wallace labors to underscore that Cantor did not derive “his most famous proofs about [infinity] while in an asylum….” (p. 167.) “Cantor’s first hospitalization was in 1884, when he was 39; most of his important work had already been done by then. He wasn’t hospitalized against until 1899. It was in the last 20 years of his life that he was in and out of places all the time.” (p. 167.)

Cantor was “something of a violin prodigy as a child. No one knows why he quit, but after a classical quartet in college there’s no more mention of the violin.” (p. 170.)

Elsewhere Wallace speaks of the high correlation of mathematicians and musicians (p. 181), which probably speaks to left brain functioning rather than a counterintuitive mix of art and science. I found this observation about mathematicians loving music to be especially intriguing because it partially explains my maternal grandfather Lawrence Schoenhals’ achievements in these heretofore seemingly disparate fields: he held a masters in math from the University of Michigan and also conducted an orchestra.

Wallace draws a biographical sketch of another important figure from this era: Karl Weierstrass. Wallace writes: “His early career is spent teaching high school in West Prussia (not exactly a hub), [footnote omitted] and he’s said to have been literally too poor to afford the postage for submitting work to journals. He finally starts publishing in the late 1850s, and sets math on its collective ear, and gets hired by prestigious U. Berlin as a prof—it’s all a long and kind of romantic story. (IYI [“If you're interested”] Weierstrass is also a conspicuous among mathematicians for being physically large, a gifted athlete, an inveterate partier and blowoff in college, indifferent to music (most mathematicians are fiends for music), and a cheery non-neurotic, gregarious, wholly good and much-loved fellow. He’s also widely regarded as the greatest math teacher of the century, even though he never published his lectures or even let his students take notes. [footnote omitted])” (p. 181; italics supplied.)

The book contains an unusual amount of what my English composition teacher in high school disparagingly called “Dear Reader notes”. Perhaps Wallace employs them to help guide the reader through dense verbiage about math (a difficult and imprecise task) or to make it “a piece of pop technical writing” as he asserts is his aim in the “Small But Necessary Foreword. (p. 1.) I however found them too clever by half and a hindrance. Example: “All right.” (p. 246.) That’s a complete sentence in Everything and More. Others: "Soft News Interpolation, Placed Here Ante Rem Because This is the Last Place To Do It Without Disrupting the Juggernaut-like Momentum of the Pre-Cantor Mathematical Context" (p. 167); and “End Q.F.-V.I. Return to §7c, at the ¶ on p. 256 w/ asterisk at end”. (p. 257.)

I recommend the book to those with strong math backgrounds and to others who can parse through the technical language to extract the nuggets of "nape-tingling genius" (p. 248) residing therein.

Imprecision.

David Foster Wallace, in his staggering book on the mathematical concept of infinity, Everything and More, provides a story showing how words can make math ambiguous.

"Three men check into a motel late at night. There's only one room left, and it costs $30, and the men decide to each chip in $10 and share it, but when they get up to the room it's a disgusting mess--apparently there was some mixup and the room never got cleaned after the last people checked out--and understandably the men call down to the manager to complain.

***

"After a certain amount of back and forth the manager agrees to knock $5 off the price of the room and to supply clean linens, and he sends a bellboy up to the room with the linens and towels and the $5 refund in the form of five $1 bills. ... [T]here's five $1 bills and three guys, so what the guys ... do is they each take back one dollar and let the bellboy keep the remaining $2 as a tip. So each man originally paid $10 and got $1 back, meaning each paid $9, which adds up to $27, and the bellboy has the other $2, which altogether sums to $29, so where's the other dollar?" (p. 34.)

Foster concludes: "[T]he point is that the verbiage ... lulls you into fuzzily trying to calculate (30 - 3) + 2 instead of the apposite (30 - 5) + (3 + 2), resulting in much confusion and mirth..." (pp. 34-35.)

Similarly, language can make the law ambiguous and sometimes intentionally so. For example, words like "reasonable" or other adjectives can be subject to considerable interpretation. Often legislation is drafted to keep such ambiguity inherent in the words to allow for judicial interpretation of such terms in the factual context of particular cases. Likewise, advocates can use adjectives and adverbs to hedge. When you see a legal brief replete with adjectives and adverbs you have to wonder what is being hidden and why.

Praising the Good (An Occasional Series).

I have to confess I didn't know who David Foster Wallace was before he committed suicide this month at 46. I have been digging into his past and am highly impressed.

I have ordered Infinite Jest, his epic 1,000-plus-page novel (on Time's list of the top 100 novels of 1923-2006), and have looked at his 2003 book on the mathematical concept of infinity (Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity) as well as his book about traveling with Sen. John McCain during the 2000 campaign (McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope). To say he had writing range is an understatement.

In his book on infinity, a remarkably complex spin through math theory by an admitted amateur, he suggested mathematicians suffer from mental illness more than artists. He said its emphasis on abstraction causes a detachment from reality, and those who intentionally detach from reality (e.g. artists and other creative types) don't have the same risk of mental disease. He also included a staggering concept that there are certain computations or numbers that are so large that a computer larger than earth, working for longer than earth existed, couldn't finish the computation. A mind-bender, to be sure.

Look for some forthcoming Wallace book reviews here.