IN DEFENSE OF "MUSLIM WOMEN'S SWIM TIME"

This past Sunday I went to the Princeton University pool to swim after church. I arrived a bit early, around 12:45. The pool wasn't supposed to open until 1pm. When I walked down into the basement of Dillon gym there was a sign on the door, "WOMEN ONLY SWIM, MEN KEEP OUT." Perplexed, I sat down on the steps outside the pool deck and waited for 1pm.

Not too long after I sat down, I was joined by a diminutive old man in a speedo who pulled a face when he saw the sign, and then sat down next to me. As we were sitting there---speculating to one another about why the pool was closed to men---two other guys in business suits (apparently touring the facility) walked past us into the pool area. Whereupon the lifeguard began yelling, telling them to clear out.

As the lifeguard ushered the two unsuspecting men off the pool deck, a lady in a one-piece suit with wild hair walked up and said, "what's all the commotion?" The old man and I shrugged. Then the lifeguard explained that the pool was closed so that female Muslim students could swim without revealing themselves to any men. This made perfect sense to me, and I was quite proud that Princeton had chosen to respect the wishes of their female Muslim students by setting aside this time. But just as I was about to respond to the lifeguard with this thought, the lady with the wild hair raised her voice and made the following comment; "You know what this is? I'll tell you what this is. This is the institutional perpetuation of the religious abuse of women!"

No lady, what this is... is in fact the freedom of religion and cultural sensitivity being carried out, it's meant to protect all of us from the tyranny of people like you.

"I felt it in myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands. To release the energy that fuels the stars. To let it do your bidding. And to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky, it is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles, I would say, this is what you might call 'technical arrogance' that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

-----Freeman Dyson, talking about his work on nuclear weaponry in the NYT Magazine

“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.”

"I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger and watching the CBS soap opera “As The World Turns” on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith. . . . There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid. . . . Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera . . . and at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’ ” which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ”—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. . . . It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns.’ ” . . . I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter—even just to myself—I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way."

-----David Foster Wallace, excerpts from his unpublished last novel


After [his wife] left, Wallace went into the garage and turned on the lights. He wrote her a two-page note. Then he crossed through the house to the patio, where he climbed onto a chair and hanged himself. When one character dies in “Infinite Jest,” he is “catapulted home over . . . glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.”
Green returned home at nine-thirty, and found her husband. In the garage, bathed in light from his many lamps, sat a pile of nearly two hundred pages. He had made some changes in the months since he considered sending them to Little, Brown. The story of “David Wallace” was now first. In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel. This was his effort to show the world what it was to be “a fucking human being.” He had not completed it to his satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the ending he chose.


“This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values, and it’s our job to make them up.”

-----David Foster Wallace, excerpt from a 1993 interview


“I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do, but it does, and now I’m back here flogging away (in all senses of the word) and feeding my own wastebasket.”

-----David Foster Wallace, from a letter to Don DeLillo

"Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused. I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible. If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes. It is as easy as lying; because it is lying. The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth. I find myself under the same intolerable bondage. I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it. It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't. One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths. And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke."

-----G.K. Chesterton, from the introduction to "Orthodoxy"....lest you thought he was kidding.