I'm going to finish DT Max's profile after posting; that will end the fifty-two minute parenthetical I undertook to find and digest the commencement address. But I want to link my readers (are there any?) to it because it has something to say about attention and Truth which I have rarely seen in my reading. In fact, it is uncanny how close I feel to an author whose published work I am not the least bit familiar with as a result of this web-enabled tangent.
In Islamic theology, Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven from Jerusalem one day in order to have a little chat with God. Except that when he arrives at the uppermost tier of paradise, where the deity resides, he cannot actually see God; Muhammad can go only as far as the boundary of the Lote-tree, which blocks all sensory perception of the creator:
"The Prophet and Gabriel travelled once more until they reached the absolute limit of the created intellect, named sidrat al-muntaha: 'The Lote-Tree of the Furthest Boundary.' There they saw nothing which the tongue could describe. The effect of the sight they beheld on the Prophet is a secret which took place in his heart."
The Prophet goes on to receive instructions from God on how his followers should pray, and he then returns to Mecca. However, there is something meaningful in the description of the encounter that I would like to tie to my awe of the Wallace speech and why you should read it.
True or not, Muhammad's Night-Journey is one of the more beautiful descriptions of the slipperiness of capital-T Truth in everyday, tedious adult life. It's that feeling that something meaningful is here, right in front of me, yet maddeningly out of reach at the same time. Truth exists yet our faculties of perception are useless to grasp it, like trying to put the star-piece in the square hole.
Inside the Wallace speech is some truth, and having read it only once I feel like Muhammad (or Dante, who has a similar encounter with God in the Paradiso; see picture) standing before the Lote-tree. At the risk of drawing out this analogy, I'll mention that I'm not linking DFW to God, or his speech to the Bible, or any such thing; I'm merely saying that something important lies therein and it will take great effort and strain to perceive and remember it for as long as I'm alive.
A tattoo, maybe?
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