Enduring Tedium.

Ezra Stoller, John Hancock Building, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Chicago, IL, 1970.

Before you leave here to resume that crude approximation of a human life you have heretofore called a life, I will undertake to inform you of certain truths. I will then offer an opinion as to how you might most profitably view and respond to those truths. (...) You will return to your homes and families for the holiday vacation and, in that festive interval before the last push of CPA examination study - trust me - you will hesitate, you will feel dread and doubt. This will be natural. You will, for what seems the first time, feel dread at your hometown chums' sallies about accountancy as the career before you, you will read the approval in your parents' smiles as an approval of your surrender - oh, I have been there gentlemen ; I know every cobble in the road you are walking. For the hour approaches. To begin, in that literally dreadful interval of looking down before the leap outward, to hear dolorous forecasts as to the sheer drudgery of the profession you are choosing, the lack of excitement or chance to shine on the athletic fields or ballroom floors of life heretofore. 

(...) 

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility ; of the flattery of choice without duress - this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end. The first of many deaths. Hesitation is natural. Doubt is natural.

(...)

I wish to inform you that the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic. Please note that I have said “inform” and not “opine” or “allege” or “posit.” The truth is that what you soon go home to your carols and toddies and books and CPA examination preparation guides to stand on the cusp of is - heroism.

(...)

Gentlemen - by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood - gentlemen, here is a truth : Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither you nor I have made, heroism. Heroism. By which, I mean true heroism, not heroism as you might know it from films or the tales of childhood. You are now nearly at childhood’s end ; you are ready for the truth’s weight, to bear it. The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all - all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience. An audience. Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality - there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand ? Here is the truth - actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.

(...)

True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care - with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk. You and the return, you and the cash-flow data, you and the inventory protocol, you and the depreciation schedules, you and the numbers.

(...)

True heroism is a priori incompatible with audience or applause or even the bare notice of the common run of man. In fact, the less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting or even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism, and therefore as a denomination of joy unequaled by any you men can yet imagine 

(...)

Too much, you say ? Cowboy, paladin, hero ? Gentlemen, read your history. Yesterday's hero pushed back at bounds and frontiers - he penetrated, tamed, hewed, shaped, made, brought things into being. Yesterday's society's heroes generated facts. 

(...)

For this is what society is - an agglomeration of facts. In today's world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentlemen, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made - the contest is now in the slicing.

See also here and there.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, Little, Brown & Co., 2011, p.230-233.

Merci à A.H.