by Zoë Pollock
Morgan Meis illuminates the religion in David Foster Wallace's final work:
"Simple attention, awareness" is a powerful force in The Pale King. In the novel, DFW has turned the entire bureaucracy of the IRS into a secret hiding place for those who seek to perfect the art of paying attention. You could say that David Foster Wallace was looking for a place for prayer in modern American life. It was Simone Weil, the great Catholic/Jewish philosopher and mystic of the 20th century, who once said that, "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." That is exactly the power all the characters of The Pale King are learning about, absolute unmixed attention. The IRS building in Peoria, as Wallace imagines it, is practically a monastery. The acolytes are at their examiners tables learning how to pray. The U.S. tax code becomes the new catechism.
From Wallace's 2005 Kenyon commencement address:
In the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. …
On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
(Photo by Egor Shapovalov from his series One)
The Dish 