The essential thing 'in heaven and earth' is...that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living. - Neitzsche

David Foster Wallace's magnum opus Infinite Jest (IJ) is a prolix investigation of the difficult but ultimately possible task of of maintaining a "long obedience in the same direction."  Among the host of characters in IJ, Don Gately, recovering Demerol addict and an employee of The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, (sic) is the exemplar of this ethic. Gately endures. He endures long hours with low pay at multiple jobs. He endures the stupid and frustrating antics of the tenants under his care at Ennet House. He endures the painfully obvious cliches of AA. Finally, when Gately is faced with his ultimate test (he is hospitalized for a gun shot wound and refuses medication for the pain because of his addiction) he endures by breaking time down into management chunks of one heartbeat at a time:

 He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there...He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just a matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unedurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unedurable news you then somehow believed.

It would be easy to infer that endurance is merely an end in itself for Wallace.  But in a WSJ summary of his Kenyon College commencement address he insists that he is not getting wrapped up in metaphysics. This is a pragmatic question:

None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

The virtue of endurance shown by Gately creates the possibility for people to stay both "conscious and alive". This is not as melodramatic as it first sounds. Wallace is talking about living in reality and facing all of the joy and terror that it can present and not wanting to stick one's head in the sand or "shoot (one'self) in the head". The alternative to staying conscious and alive is illustrated in IJ as what Pascal called love of "noise and stir". It is a covering up of the emptiness of life through motion and activity. It doesn't matter if that activity is as admirable, and supposedly idyllic, as a tennis prep school or detestable and decried as the cycle of addiction, the purpose of all of these activities is the same: to hide the total emptiness of a life that would need to be accounted for if the busyness stopped.

The obvious question for Wallace and Neitzsche is "does this long discipline in the same direction actually provide anything but another shield from the nihilism?" Assuming there is a satisfactory answer the follow-up question should be "how can a person do this without becoming a fundamentalist?"

Wallace might point us back to the IJ character Remy Marathe  for answers. Remy tells Hugh Steeply:

Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. what you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.

And later the crucial question

Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?

It is the very un-ironic activity of truly believing in something, to love it so much that you wouldn't "think two times", that provides a meaning for life that is sustainable. But it is not fundamentalism because it is a life of freedom. Freedom that is exercised daily or even "in the space between heartbeats." But not blind faith. No simple default mechanism will suffice.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

Freedom for Wallace seems to also be intimate and based in community. As noted above the purpose of freedom is not to experience a type of ultimate self realization. In fact Wallace is even suspicious of a love or feeling that would rise from within and present you with an object of worship. As Huge Steeply asks Remy Marathe in IJ, "What if you just love? without deciding?" Remy's response: 

Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self's sentiments; a citizen of nothing...you believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.

Freedom must be exercised. It cannot be indulged in, yielded or surrendered to.

Remy's question from before begins to ring in our ears. Who teaches your children how to choose a temple? Even in a culture in which individualism is prized and the choosing an authentic position for oneself is exalted we are not acting in isolation. As Philosopher Charles Taylor puts it in his book Sources of the Self: The making of the Modern Identity: "Each young person may take up a stance which is authentically his or her own; but the very possibility of this is enframed in a social understanding of great temporal depth, in fact, in a 'tradition'."

So even the idea of going off to find one's own way apart from the influence of family or religion is part of a larger tradition. It exists within a context and a culture. And so Remy's question still stands. Who teaches the children how to choose a temple? and included in that question is another question: is this tradition of individualism really the best way to prepare human beings for living?

In a Salon interview after the release of IJ Wallace discusses receiving instruction from his parents and expresses the need for his generation to rediscover the morality of a previous generation:

It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that’s gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like “It’s really important not to lie.” OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don’t feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can’t trust you. I feel that I’m in pain, I’m nervous, I’m lonely and I can’t figure out why. Then I realize, “Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie.” The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting — which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff — can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.

The "intellectualization" of principles could be a critique of a type of enlightenment ethic which sought to detach the moral framework of religion (a supposedly private experience) from its mooring in sacred text and instead make it public by grounding it in a timeless ethic common to all. But I think this would be putting words in Wallace's mouth. He was more concerned about the American cultural compulsion towards the titillating.

"The Entertainment", a film in IJ which is so entertaining that upon being viewed once it renders the viewer powerless to do anything but continue re-watching the film, is an icon of titillation. It goes a step beyond the other examples of "noise and stir" in IJ by removing the freedom to choose. If we use that as a type of ultimate undoing of freedom to choose and there by destroying the ability to be "conscious and alive" then what would be the other end of the spectrum. What would "actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't"?

The answer in IJ is communities of discipline. The Ennet house and the  Enfield Tennis Academy both provide moral  and physical shelter and nourishment to those who are interested in, or maybe those who are capable of, receiving it. Both of them also give room to members of the community who are not interested in avoiding the "noise an stir". In fact, because these are not ashrams, the system of each organization actually drives members towards success and away from being "conscious and alive": Overcome Alcoholism! Get to the Show! But the more independent and isolated a character in IJ the more lethal their obsession. James Incandenza is the obvious example. He is deceased before the narrative begins. Suicide. His gift to the world? The lethal "Entertainment". The most giving and selfless characters in the book are Gately and a psudo-spiritual-sports adviser named Lyle at the Tennis Academy.

And what is the ideal that these places teach? Not "what to desire." As Hugh Steeply tells Remy Marathe. "To teach how to be free. To teach how to make knowledgeable choices about pleasure and delay..." Wallace appears to champion a type of secular grace free of a specific telos or god. The end for him is unimportant. What is important is learning how to survive in a country that has gutted boring mid-western morality in favor of the aesthetically or intellectually sexy. You can't force freedom on someone. So Wallace sees that one must simply be available to provide guidance when a person hits bottom. This is the long discipline that makes life meaningful: to always be available to provide another the path to freedom.

Lane Severson is a recovering child-prodigy, father, and Anglican. Follow Lane on Twitter @ljseverson