Akira The Don, David Foster Wallace - Meaning From Experience lyrics

Here’s another didactic little story
There are these two guys sitting together
In a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness
One of the guys is religious
The other is an atheist
And the two are arguing
About the existence of God with that
Special intensity that comes after about
The fourth beer and the atheist says
Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual
Reasons for not believing in God
It’s not like I haven’t
Ever experimented with
The whole God and prayer thing
Just last month I got caught away from
The camp in that terrible blizzard
And I was totally lost and
I couldn’t see a thing and it was 50 below
And so I tried it
I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out
‘Oh, God, if there is a God’


‘I’m lost in this blizzard
And I’m gonna die if you don’t help me’
And now, in the bar
The religious guy looks at
The atheist all puzzled
‘Well then you must believe now’ he says
‘After all’ ‘Here you are’
‘Alive’

The atheist just rolls his eyes ‘No, man
All that was was a couple
Eskimos happened to come wandering
By and showed me the way back to camp’

It’s easy to run this story through kind
Of a standard liberal arts analysis
The exact same experience can
Mean two totally
Different things to two different people
Given those people’s two
Different belief templates
And two different ways of
Constructing meaning from experience

Experience meaning from experience
Experience meaning from experience
Experience experience
Meaning from experience

Because we prize tolerance and
Diversity of belief
Nowhere in our liberal arts
Analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s
Interpretation is true
And the other guy’s is false or bad
Which is fine except we also never end
Up talking about just
Where these individual templates and
Beliefs come from
Meaning, where they come from
INSIDE the two guys
As if a person’s most basic
Orientation toward the world
And the meaning of his experience
Were somehow just hard-wired
Like height or shoe-size
Or automatically absorbed from the culture
Like language
As if how we construct meaning were
Not actually a matter of personal
Intentional choice

Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance
The nonreligious guy is so totally certain
In his dismissal of the possibility
That the passing Eskimos
Had anything to do with his prayer for help
True
There are plenty of religious people who seem
Arrogant and certain of
Their own interpretations
Too They’re probably even more
Repulsive than atheists
At least to most of us
But religious dogmatists’ problem
Is exactly the
Same as the story’s unbeliever
Blind certainty
A close-mindedness that amounts to an
Imprisonment so total that
The prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up

The point here
Is that I think this is one part of what
Teaching me how to think
Is really supposed to mean
To be just a little less arrogant
To have just a little
Critical awareness about myself
And my certainties because a huge percentage
Of stuff that I tend to
Be automatically certain of is, it turns out
Totally wrong and deluded
I have learned this the hard way
As I predict you graduates will, too

Meaning from experience
Meaning from experience

Experience meaning from experience
Experience experience
Meaning from experience

Meaning from experience
Meaning from experience experience
Meaning from experience experience
Experience meaning from experience