Talk about bait! Wesley Hill dropped the following quote from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King on his blog yesterday, and it’s too good not to re-post here. Another huge incentive to crack the book (after I’m through with Thor: The Mighty Avenger
This remains largely theory, but my best guess as to [my dad’s] never dispensing wisdom like other dads is that my father understood 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. I’m not putting this very well. If you begin to get the idea that other people can actually *live* by the clear, simple principles of good advice, it can make you feel even worse about your own inabilities. It can cause self-pity, which I think my father recognized as the great enemy of life and contributor to nihilism.
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3 responses to “DFW on Advice, Self-Pity and Nihilism”
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What an excellent quote!
It helps explain why a naive young parent will dispense advice about child-rearing to at the drop of a hat but a wise and successful parent with ten grown-up kids, when asked for advice, will refuse to answer. The change of context (different children especially) can make even the best advice completely worthless, or worse.