The
Broom of the System - David Foster Wallace
“...that, to repeat what I heard for
years and years and suspect you’ve been hearing over and over, yourself,
something’s meaning is nothing more or less than its function. Et cetera et
cetera et cetera. Has she done the thing with the broom with you? No? What does
she use now? No. What she did with me--I must have been eight, or twelve, who
remembers--was to sit me down in the kitchen and take a straw broom and start
furiously sweeping the floor, and she asked me which part of the broom was more
elemental, more fundamental, in my opinion, the bristles or the handle.
The bristles or the handle. And I hemmed and hawed, and she swept more and more
violently, and I got nervous, and finally when I said I supposed the bristles,
because you could after a fashion sweep without the handle, by just holding on
to the bristles, but couldn’t sweep with just the handle, she tackled me, and
knocked me out of my chair, and yelled into my ear something like, ’Aha,
that’s because you want to sweep with the broom, isn’t it? It’s because
of what you want the broom for, isn’t it?’ Et cetera. And that if what
we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly
the fundamental essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the kitchen
window, and a crowd of the domestics gathered; but that if we wanted the broom
to sweep with, see for example the broken glass, sweep sweep, the bristles were
the thing’s essence. No? What now, then? With pencils? No matter. Meaning as
fundamentalness. Fundamentalness as use. Meaning as use. Meaning as
fundamentalness.”
That as people age, accumulate more
and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes
more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social
importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such
occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more
and more subjectively colored.”
“Weight Watchers holds as a
descriptive axiom the transparently true fact that for each of us the universe
is deeply and sharply and completely divided into for example in my case, me,
on one side, and everything else, on the other. This for each of us
exhaustively defines the whole universe... And then they hold by a prescriptive
axiom the undoubtedly equally true and inarguable fact that we each ought to
desire our own universe to be as full as possible, that the Great Horror
consists in an empty, rattling personal universe, one where one finds oneself
with Self, on one hand, and vastly empty lonely spaces before Others begin to
enter the picture at all, on the other. A non-full universe... The emptier
one’s universe is, the worse it is... Weight Watchers perceives the problem as
one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the
relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other... We each need a full
universe. Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically
decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will
be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in
to fill the void caused by that diminution of Self. Certainly not incorrect,
but just as certainly only half of the range of valid solutions to the
full-universe problem... Is my drift getting palpable? Just as in genetic
engineering... There is always more than one solution... An autonomously full
universe... Rather than diminishing Self to entice Other to fill our universe,
we may also of course obviously choose to fill the universe with Self... Yes. I
plan to grow to infinite size... There will of course eventually cease to be
room for anyone else in the universe at all.” ―
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