What we hope to pass on

It may be that this kind of work changes you.

-David Foster Wallace, Something to Do with Paying Attention

When my oldest son, Owen, left for college, he asked everyone else in the family to send him off with a book of our choosing. I was happy that he was looking for recommendations, but I tend to find the gifting and receiving of books to be a particularly fraught exchange. If I’m giving someone a book it is either because the book means a great deal to me, or it is one that I think they will particularly enjoy; in either scenario, if the recipient doesn’t like the book, it feels worse than if they don’t enjoy, say, the look of a sweater or the smell of a candle. And if I’ve been gifted a book and I find, after thirty pages or so, that I don’t particularly enjoy it, I always wonder if I am obligated to keep going. After all, the book means something important to someone close to me, or they think it’ll resonate with me on some level, so abandoning it feels like letting the relationship down. And with my son, I felt the added pressure of choosing the perfect vessel to impart some final words of wisdom as he set off into the wide world.

Of course I have been sharing stories with my kids since they were in diapers. I am a Bunny. Are You My Mother? Go, Dog, Go. Books my parents read to me when I was little, and ones my wife’s parents read to her as well, and as the kids got older it was a joy to venture into Narnia and Middle-earth, and the magical worlds created by Madeleine L’Engle and Susan Cooper. For Owen, as for so many kids in his generation, the truly foundational texts were the Harry Potter series (the last two books came out shortly after he was born, and he grew up in that enchanted world). Reading these books aloud to Owen and his younger brother are some of my fondest memories of those early years. I would go directly from reading George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Flannery O’Connor in grad school seminars to reading the adventures of Harry, Ron, and Hermione in the boys’ bedroom. My Dumbledore voice was a subtle variation of my Gandalf voice, which itself was an imitation of the voice my own father used when he read The Lord of the Rings aloud to my older siblings and me when we were all young (reading aloud and attending Mass being the two fundamental traditions that have been passed down through my father’s familial line). But we were many years removed from the reading aloud stage, and I was a bit torn about which book to choose.

I went to our Family Favorites shelf and looked over the options. At our house we have many (many) bookshelves, but the most prominent one is on our second floor landing, right next to our main bathroom; we call it the Family Favorites shelf because everyone in the family (there are now five of us) from my wife and I down to our first grader gets to pick books to be prominently displayed there. There are six shelves, but we are a family that loves books, so although it can hold a fair amount it is always full to bursting; if anyone wants to add a new book they need to remove one of their previous choices in order to make room. No one is allowed to remove any other family member’s choice (I love Mo Willems as much—probably more—than the next adult, but I’d be willing to swap out Elephant and Piggie Omnibus 2 in order to fit Joe Posnanski’s The Baseball 100 or the latest Ann Patchett, but this is not allowed; only my youngest can change his choices—and he mostly does not, since he tends to forget that he has stashed some of his favorites on the shelf in the first place).

Toward the end of high school, Owen decided to start reading his way through the Family Favorites shelf. He had long since moved on from the fantasy stories of his youth (though he, like any reader, still retains affection for those early classics, and has been known to revisit Hogwarts and Middle Earth in times of stress or sorrow), and after a detour through the Marvel and DC comic worlds, he was looking to expand into more adult fare. He is a person who loves lists and systematic approaches to things, so he thought this would be a good way to discover the more grown up things my wife and I loved without continually asking us for recommendations. In the final months that he was still living at home he made intermittent progress across the top shelf, but between finals and then unending graduation parties and a summer job, he didn’t get far, which was one reason that he had asked each of us to send him off a favorite or two.

When I initially perused the shelves, the first book that I lingered over was Infinite Jest. Although it is one one of my favorites, and it is, I think, a book ideally first read when one is around twenty (in this, it’s like The Brothers Karamazov, another book that repays reading at any age, but is best first experienced when one is at the tail end of adolescence, and perhaps first thinking intentionally about big questions of meaning, value, belief, and virtue), I knew I couldn’t choose it. Wallace’s books, particularly Infinite Jest, carry a lot of cultural baggage, and I didn’t want Owen’s new college acquaintances to see IJ sitting prominently on a shelf and form a lot of assumptions about what kind of kid he is (namely, the sort of straight white male who prominently displays Infinite Jest). Still, though, Owen had never read any of Wallace’s work, and as he was setting off for college it made sense to me to share something of this author that means so much to me, personally and professionally (the first peer reviewed essay that I had accepted for publication while in grad school was on Wallace and faith, and I’ve written and presented on him numerous times since; I am now the co-editor of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies).

But I hesitated, wondering if it is better to present one’s child with the thing one loves, or to let them come to it on their own. This is a question I’ve thought a lot about over the years. My own father is a literary scholar; his primary area of research is the work of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. He has been editor of The Merton Annual and The Merton Seasonal, was president of the International Thomas Merton Society, and has edited more than a dozen Merton-related books. I grew up surrounded by Merton’s work; I think it is quite likely that my dad has the most extensive collection of Merton related books in private hands. But even as I developed my own personal literary tastes and scholarly pursuits, and as Catholicism became an important part of my own young adult (and then adult) identity, my dad never directly shared Merton’s work with me. This might have been because he had tried to get my older siblings to read Merton with limited success, so he thought it better to let me find him on my own, if I wanted to. And this was, perhaps, the right strategy; I did end up eventually pulling The Seven Storey Mountain off the shelf on my own, wondering if this was the right place to start. I might have bailed on it if I felt like it was assigned reading (in the latter half of the book Merton ends up sounding a bit too self-assured about the Catholic Church for my tastes—though to be fair to Merton he, too, came to regret the triumphalist tone of those pages). Instead, over the years, I have continued to dip in and out of his work, and while he’ll never be ‘mine,’ I do find his nuanced, sophisticated perspective on the faith to be one of the reasons I am still a Catholic, despite the myriad flaws of the Church.

Would I have felt the same way about Merton if my dad had given his books to me and asked me to read them? I honestly don’t know. I was the kind of kid who did what his parents asked, and many of the writers who shaped my youthful understanding of the world—Lewis, Tolkien, L’Engle—were first introduced to me by my parents. I wouldn’t be who I am if I had not read these texts as a child, or O’Connor and Walker Percy and Dorothy Day and Annie Dillard in college, or Wallace and Alice McDermott and Toni Morrison and George Saunders as an adult. Merton is a part of this formation, and probably would be regardless of how I first encountered him. Each of these writers helped shape my worldview, which is why they all now command a place of honor on the Family Favorites bookshelf.

As I looked over the six shelves of books, running my fingers over the spines of books by all of these authors, it was sometimes hard to recall if a given book was one of my choices or one of my wife’s; we both grew up voracious readers, and some of our first gifts to each other were books that we loved. The Venn Diagram between the books Lauren’s parents read to her as a child (or that she, precocious early reader, read to herself) and the ones I grew up with is close to a pure circle, which was undoubtedly a contributing factor to why we clicked so quickly when we met as college freshman, and why we’ve been happily married for over twenty years. These foundational stories form a set of shared experiences that existed before we knew each other, like plants growing in the same soil. And then in college we shared many of the same classes (despite her majoring in Biology and I in English), so we read the same books in seminars and discussed them late into the night with our cohort of friends, many of whom we still see regularly—all of us bound to each other by these exchanges of ideas. And these experiences shaped so many of the choices Lauren and I made as a young couple (we married a year out from graduation), and then as young parents (Owen was born just under a year after the wedding).

Now that my oldest is the same age that Lauren and I were when we first started dating, I want this for him, too. Not just to share beloved texts with his future partner, but for me to be able to share something of this with him as well—to impart to him a text that says something meaningful about how I see and understand the world, so he can rely on it when he approaches his own life choices.

only a few favorites

And as I stared at the bookshelf and weighed the various choices, I realized that while Infinite Jest was not a great choice, there was another Wallace book that very deliberately and overtly reflects on what it is like to be in one's late teens/ early twenties and living in Chicago and trying to figure out what to do with one’s life. I ended up giving Owen Something to Do with Paying Attention, a recently republished excerpt from The Pale King, the unfinished novel Wallace was working on at the time of his death.

It is a story about fathers and sons, and about being lost and aimless and experiencing a conversion (of sorts), and how being converted, and finding meaning and purpose, does not necessarily fix everything in one’s life (which, curiously enough, are many of the themes found in Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain). It comes in the form of Chris Fogle’s (overly digressive) first person narration of how he ended up joining the IRS. He explains how as a teen and young adult he was, “the worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn’t even aware that he’s a nihilist. …My essential response to everything was ‘Whatever’” (154). He recounts the nature of this young adult aimlessness, and describes a series of moments that change his life—though, because of his digressiveness, the arc of his journey is not entirely clear until the novella ends. The primary transformative event is when he, as a college student, stumbles into the wrong classroom during finals week and hears a substitute tax professor challenging his students to pursue “heroic” lives, where he defines heroism as dedicatedly doing good work without expecting acknowledgment or reward: “‘True heroism is a priori incompatible with audience or applause or even the bare notice of the common run of man. In fact…the less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting or even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism, and therefore as a denomination of joy unequaled by any you men can yet imagine’” (230). While this claim that “joy unequaled” can result from the tedium of tax preparation may strain credulity, it strikes a chord with Fogle; he has been searching for someone to point him in a definitive direction, and this lecture does the trick.

I first read this story when I was in grad school at Loyola University in Chicago, about five miles north of where Owen is now in school, at DePaul (which, coincidentally, is where Fogle is a student when he has his life changing experience in the Advanced Tax class). At the time, I wasn’t feeling particularly lost. I had already passed through the post-college period of wondering what I wanted to do with my life, which, in my case, meant starting a PhD program in Boston, focusing on Renaissance Literature, and then leaving it, because I was not sure if a life spent reading, discussing, and writing about texts with students and fellow scholars was meaningful; I then spent a few years working an office job while my wife was in medical school, where I realized that even if reading and teaching texts was not Meaningful in the same way as curing diseases or fighting climate change, it beat writing memos and taking notes during meetings—at least I found joy in texts. So I ended up back in graduate school, this time focusing on works that meant more to me than Elizabethan poetry and drama. At this point I also had two young children, and a wife working 80 hour weeks in her pediatric residency program, so questions about meaning took a back seat to the daily responsibilities of parenting and house management. “What is it all about?” seemed like a luxurious question I was no longer asking. But reading Wallace’s unfinished novel, and particularly this section, where Fogle struggles to clarify his own sense of what matters, still struck a chord.

While I did not really identify with Fogle’s central dilemma—that he was a “feckless…wastoid” who lacked direction and purpose (222)—his claim that he was moving through life like he “was dead or asleep without even being aware of it,” did hit closer to home. The arc of his journey pointed to questions that I had pretty deliberately not been thinking about, which (interestingly enough) were the same questions that Merton tackles in The Seven Storey Mountain, which basically boil down to, “What are we doing with our lives? What do we pay attention to? How do we live purposefully and deliberately?” In the midst of the daily obligations of adult life we do not always have time to even ask these questions, let alone answer them, but it is still right and good to take the time to pay attention to how we are living. To stop and reflect. To check in with ourselves and ask these Big Questions every now and again, and reading the Fogle chapter led me to do just this. Remembering this aspect of the text is what led me to identify it as a good one to give to Owen, as he grappled with his own decisions about the direction of his life.

After buying a copy of Something to Do with Paying Attention for Owen, I pulled The Pale King off the shelf and reread the Fogle chapter (§22), and then—because Wallace is a masterful writer—I kept reading. One thing that struck me upon rereading it is how ambivalent the novel as a whole is about Fogle’s arc. After his experience in the Advanced Tax lecture, he commits himself to clearing the necessary hurdles in order to join the IRS, and in other sections of the book we see him carrying out this mission. From Fogle’s own narrative and self-conception, this decision is clearly an unreservedly positive one. He finds meaning and fulfillment in the work. It is, truly, a conversion story; he moves from a life without focus or purpose to one where he has a clear vocation, and thrives as a result. He takes off the old self and puts on a new one. But in the broader context of the novel, it is unclear if this choice is as purely positive as Fogle believes it to be. Two pages after his section concludes, another character savages Fogle for his long winded and self-serving narrative (“I’m not going to waste time noodling about every last gap and imprecision in my own memory, a prime cautionary example of which is ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle’s vocational soliloquy” (257)). We then see “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’s name as the first words in Section 25, in which the text is formatted in two columns and consists primarily of a list of character names who “turn a page” (“‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page,” etc. (310)); it is one of the more extreme depictions of workplace monotony and crushing boredom in contemporary literature. In his own understanding of his life, Fogle’s choice to join the IRS saves him; in the larger structure of The Pale King, this thing that gives Fogle meaning is depicted as “soul murdering” (385). Is it both? How can we know?

This led me back to Merton’s own conversion journey. In The Seven Storey Mountain he, like Fogle, moves from a place of feeling lost, aimless, and misguided, to finding salvation and purpose. Merton begins the book describing himself as “living…in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers” (3); this feeling is particularly pronounced during his college years at Cambridge, about which he writes, “in all this I was stamping the last remains of spiritual vitality out of my own soul, and trying with all my might to crush and obliterate the image of the divine liberty that had been implanted in me by God” (121). Of course, the arc of the book is a movement from this feeling of desolation to one of salvation, first through his conversion to Catholicism, and eventually coming to fulfillment in his entrance to the Trappist order. Later in his life, though, he recognizes the idealism and romanticism of his initial conversion, and he comes to chafe under the restrictions of the order. Conversions are meaningful, but after we convert, life still needs to be lived. Finding clarity and meaning once does not necessarily mean we have it forever.

In his book Life and Holiness, Merton is quite explicit about the need for an ongoing conversion experience. He writes, “we are not ‘converted’ only once in our life but many times, and this endless series of large and small ‘conversions,’ inner revolutions, leads finally to our transformation in Christ” (159). Whether one undergoes a spiritual conversion, like Merton, or a more prosaic conversion from aimlessness to purpose, like Fogle, the initial change is significant, but it is not sufficient.

This call to continual conversion and renewal surely resonates with me, a 43 year old man, more than it will for Owen, who, at 19, is far more likely to identify with the Merton of his Cambridge days, or the directionless Fogle. As such, there is part of me that—like the substitute Advanced Tax teacher—desires to impart the wisdom of experience. Who wants to highlight the passages of the text that I think might be particularly resonant for him (like, for instance, when Wallace writes that Fogle, along with all of his peers, felt “desolate and and disillusioned and unmotivated and directionless and lost” (213), or where Fogle claims he “was, in a way, too free…I was free to choose ‘whatever’ because it didn’t really matter. But that this, too, was because of something I chose—I had somehow chosen to have nothing matter” (223)). But of course I recognize that if a text is going to have an impact on its reader, it won’t be because someone else came along and said, ‘take note of this line!’ Things strike a chord, or do not, based on circumstances beyond our ability to control.

This question of how and why things do, or do not, make an impact on one’s life is actually a recurring theme in Wallace’s novella. Fogle writes that his dad felt, “that advice—even wise advice—actually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of his own situation and path” (208). I do not necessarily think that advice does nothing, but I do think it is rare for someone to hear it, accept it, and be radically changed. As Fogle notes a few pages later, “enormous, sudden, dramatic, unexpected, life-changing experiences are not translatable or explainable to anyone else. …This is because their power isn’t just a result of the experience itself, but also of the circumstances in which it hits you, of everything in your previous life-experience which has led up to it and made you exactly who and what you are when the experience hits you” (214). We cannot control when we will experience these life altering moments, and we cannot know what, exactly, will cause them. For Fogle, the tax lecture was the proximate cause, but he’d been prepared for it by a series of other events discussed in the novella (including the traumatic death of his father, and a subsequent discussion about the nature of conversion with a born-again Christian).

Merton, when describing his own journey, declares that his salvation from “the confusion and the misery in which [he] had come to find [himself]” was initially precipitated by “books and ideas and poems and stories, pictures and music, buildings, cities, places, philosophies” (178). I find this strangely encouraging. We might not be able to know what will have a profound effect on the course of our lives, but, Merton tells us, “our salvation begins on the level of common and natural and ordinary things” (178). Everyone feels lost at times, and we are all continually in need of conversion. We might be resistant to hearing this, directly, even from loved ones. But grace works in unanticipated ways, and our encounters with ordinary things, even books and ideas, can reorient us on our journey. Toward the end of The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton writes: “In one sense we are always travelling, and travelling as if we did not know where we were going. In another sense we have already arrived” (419). And so, after much deliberation, I handed my son Wallace’s book, and I encouraged him to talk about it—with his roommates, classmates, with me. Who can say where it will lead?