The
Pale King - David Foster Wallace
“How odd I can have all this inside
me and to you it’s just words.”
The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with
boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything
vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to
find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive,
the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. It is the key to modern life. If you are
immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”
“Gentlemen, here is a truth:
Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is....
True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise,
judicious exercise of probity and care--with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”
“The truth is that the heroism of
your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand
gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic
battle whose outcome resolves all--all designed to appear heroic, to excite and
gratify and audience. Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality--there is no
audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand?
Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No
one queues up to see it. No one is interested.”
“I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a
bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance
of which causes great suffering.
But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever
really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in
a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I
discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or
wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty,
vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and
tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities,
rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought
and action.
“Hear this or not, as you will.
Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony,
ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui --
these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome
indeed. For they are real.”
“...and suddenly it occurred to him
that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and
affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to
other birds, be the birds each saying 'Get away' or 'This branch is mine!' or
'This tree is mine! I'll kill you! Kill, kill!' Or any other manner of dark,
brutal, or self-protective stuff—they might be listening to war cries. The
thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip for some reason.”
“The next suitable person you’re in
light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation
and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a
concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I
can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He
doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know
everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing
they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom
they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it. This is the way of people.
Suddenly ask what’s wrong and whether they open up and spill their guts or deny
it and pretend you’re off, they’ll think you’re perceptive and understanding.
They’ll either be grateful, or they’ll be frightened and avoid you from then
on. Both reactions have their uses, as we’ll get to. You can play it either
way. This works over 90 percent of the time.”
actual TV in waiting rooms,
supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods,
BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. The terror of silence with
nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's
so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's
about something else, way down.”
“What he'd do, he'd never go out to
the length of the chain. He'd never even get out to where the chain got tight.
Even if the mailman pulled up, or a salesman. Out of dignity, this dog
pretended like he chose this one area to stay in that just happened to be
inside the length of the chain. Nothing outside of that area right there
interested him. He just had zero interest. So he never noticed the chain. He
didn't hate it. The chain. He just up and made it not relevant. maybe he wasn't
pretending--maybe he really up and chose that little circle for his own world.
He had a power to him. All of his life on that chain.”
“Corporations are getting better and
better at seducing us into thinking the way they think—of profits as the telos
and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in
reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of
thinking and making. We cannot stop it. I suspect what’ll happen is that there
will be some sort of disaster—depression, hyperinflation—and then it’ll be
showtime: We’ll either wake up and retake our freedom or we’ll fall apart
utterly. Like Rome—conqueror of its own people.”
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