You know it’s hard to say. I know a certain amount of it parallels my own experience, which was that I got real lucky early on in my twenties and had some career success and got a lot of the stuff that I thought, “If only I could get that then I would be all right,” and then discovering that I wasn’t. This sounds kind of embarrassing. I was raised in an academic environment and in a pretty middle-class one. I’d never really seen how a lot of other people lived. My chance to see that was here in Boston, and a lot of it was in the halfway houses for this book. I didn’t really understand emotionally that there are people around who didn’t have enough to eat, who weren’t warm enough, who didn’t have a place to live, whose parents beat the hell out of them regularly. And again when you say it it sounds really clichéd and blah blah blah blah. We read about it in newspapers, but to get to look into the eyes of people like this…
- Lost Interview with David Foster Wallace
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After I became a waiter, I always treated waiters very nicely
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Imagine a homeless person. Someone poor, sick, crippled, needy. Now imagine yourself as that person. Imagine that this was your life, and that you would wake up every day to the unfair consequences of your misfortune, and that life is so much harsher to you than it is to other people, and they, the other people, walk around completely focussed on their own pains and pleasures, oblivious to your own monumental struggles, when they with their blessings of excess could so easily alleviate your suffering, even momentarily, at minimal cost to themselves. But strangely none of them are willing. Imagine yourself in their shoes, and consider what a different reality they experience. What horrors and indignities they face that we couldn't even begin to imagine. How much each waking moment of their lives differs so vastly from ours, and how uncanny the thought - that these are real people - not characters in a book or anonymous caricatures in the news - but people as real and alive and respiring as yourself - literally starving, essentially drowning, physically dying. That they inhabit the same planet, the same country, the same city as you, and how it hardly ever occurs to you to think of how much and the way they suffer. (and even if it does, how our imaginings barely scratch the surface.)
Ok good, now that you've imagined being in their shoes, next imagine that you died and came back to earth as yourself, just as you are right now. And ask yourself, would I choose to live any differently? I wonder if I would
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“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
- Matthew 25:31-40
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For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
- Galatians 5:14
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