Don't Lie

It’s that tandem of honesty and considered sincerity that leads Temkin to take out his phone and pull up a 1996 Salon interview with David Foster Wallace as an example of the way he thinks about the business he’s developed with his closest friends. In it, Wallace says: “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 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—with 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.” https://www.kickstarter.com/stories/cah?ref=hero