Recently, I read Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, though not as a transcription but as the Little, Brown, & Co. book (2009), which features one sentence per page. I enjoyed reading the speech in this format. As I read through it this time, I was drawn to the following passage about narcissism.

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default setting, hardwired into our boards at birth.

This semester, I’ve talked with my students quite a bit about envy, especially when we read Othello. So I was struck by this passage in Ecclesiastes that gives insight into the vice:

And I saw that all labor and all achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbor. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. -Eccl. 4:4

My article, “Doing, not Reading: Cormac McCarthy on the Virtues and Dangers of Literature,” was published in Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice two weeks ago. In the article, I quote Andrew Delbanco’s The Real American Dream, a book that contains a lovely opening:

The premise of this book is that human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations amid which we pass our days–pain, desire, pleasure, fear–into a story. When that story leads somewhere and thereby helps us navigate through life to its inevitable terminus in death, it gives us hope.

I’ve been reading Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence (2011). As he discusses lists of the best sentences, he notes that they “are not chosen for the substantive political or social or philosophical points they make. They are chosen because they are performances of a certain skill at the highest level.”

Now that I’ve passed my dissertation defense, I am taking advantage of professional development opportunities while I’m still a Baylor student. I’ve started sitting in on a graduate class that is reading Paradise Lost, and I’m interested in the understanding of freedom articulated in the following famous line:

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven!

I’ve been reading An American Tragedy (1925) for the first time. I’m enjoying descriptions of the woes of early 20th century American life:

The reasons why a girl of Roberta’s type should be seeking employment with Griffiths and Company at this time and in this capacity are of some point. For, somewhat after the fashion of Clyde in relation to his family and his life, she too considered her life a great disappointment. (250)

None the less she was shy, and hence recessive. (252)

People like money even more than they do looks. (331)

Over the weekend, I presented a paper on Dante and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. I focused on my paper on Sheriff Bell’s retirement and spiritual malaise, which is expressed well in this passage:

Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again. I wont push my chips forward and stand up and go out to meet him […] I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would.

This morning, I read the following quotation about transition, which is very inspiring:

In a time of drastic change, one can be too preoccupied with what is ending or too obsessed with what seems to be beginning. In either case, one loses touch with the present and with its obscure but dynamic possibilities. What really matters is openness, readiness, attention, courage to face risk. You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith, and hope. In such an event, courage is the authentic form taken by love.

– Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

I read this New York Times piece by historian Kate Bowler that was published last week about the prosperity gospel. I love to see scholars apply their work to contemporary situations. Here’s my favorite idea from the article:

There has to be a reason, because without one we are left as helpless and possibly unlucky as everyone else.