This Is Water

This book is the text of a commencement address given by author (of Infinite Jest, which I will probably get round to reading at some poi- oh, who am I kidding) David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005. It also belongs to my flatmate Jack, who has gone home for Christmas, so I figured I could read it, blog about it, and return it all without his noticing in the interim few days of otherwise-festivities. The general thrust of his speech is about the complexity, difficulty, and ultimately the absolute necessity of trying to live a compassionate life. He's talking to a bunch of liberal arts graduates, so he hopes that something of the proactive and critical use of ideas which their education purportedly challenged them to grow in their capacities for might pay off here - that they may enter the world, twisted and nonsensical though it may be, and hold firmly able to interact with it as independent rational agents who are deeply and warmly aware that they are also very much interdependent beings, and they will need others' help just as others will need theirs, and to close themselves off from being able to ask for or offer this is to render themselves less than fully human for the sake of pursuing some insidious constructed lie. I found it interesting that David, though by no means a man of faith, talks at some length in this about the need for finding a coherent centre to one's worldview to help one retain the keenness of their grasp on this truth: "everyone worships... the question is what?" and goes on to include what is probably the most cogent and universal meditation on the nature of idolatry that I've ever read in a secular text. Overall he's very clear that the whole point of this conversation is not one in which anyone really learns anything new, but in which we are constantly having to remind ourselves and each other of the deep old fundamental truths that pervade our cultures and consciences just as thoroughly as they are regularly and easily forgotten. That's where the title's from: he wants us to be so fully aware of the network of moral obligations that hold society together that we become constantly cognizant of it surrounding us, like fish, patiently reminding each other as they swim along, 'this is water,' even though they cannot see it and could very easily forget it was there altogether, swimming about their own business and looking straight through it. This is water. This is water. This is water. David Foster Wallace was an outrageously clever man, and this transcripted speech veritably swells with a perspective rich with clarity and blunt wise truths.