david foster wallace this is water essay

“This Is Water” by David Foster Wallace Essay

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Introduction

Freedom in decision making, meaning and importance of education, the lesson on default setting, works cited.

David Wallace was one of the most important postmodern authors in America. He had already gained attention with his first book, “The Broom of the System.” Still, his second novel, “Infinite Jest,” catapulted him to national prominence and made him one of the most respected authors of the modern American era. ‘This is water,’ his book, was essentially an expanded version of Wallace’s commencement speech to a group of graduating students. Unlike other books, which were panned for being overly long for their own sake, this commencement speech was generally praised, and even named one of the top 10 best commencement speeches in history by ‘Time’ magazine.

In his speech ‘This is water,’ Wallace’s goal was to stress the importance of perceptiveness, and awareness of others. He felt that through combining awareness, and education, people would become well-adjusted to their surroundings. To achieve his argumentative goal for his audience, he used a personal, and comic tone. This essay will focus on giving a summary of David Wallace’s ‘The Water’.

After greeting and praising the students for their hard work, Wallace opened his address with a remarkable parable based on a fish story. The significance of the fish story, he continued, was simply that the most significant realities were frequently the most difficult to see, and discuss. In other words, people were living in water but could not see, and were completely oblivious of its presence. On the other hand, Wallace felt that most people were mistaken and that it was the mission of liberal arts education to tell them they were wrong

Liberal arts education was designed to make people aware of the water in their surroundings rather than filling their heads with unimportant information. Wallace’s main point in his speech was that often the most obvious things were the most difficult to comprehend. He stated, in particular, that negative thinking was not a choice but a natural setting, and that individuals needed to start thinking cognitively, and beyond the box.

Wallace delivered his commencement address to Kenyon College’s 2005 graduating class intending to prepare the students for the future life they were about to embark on after college. He used a grocery store example in his speech so that the students could relate since they had been in the situation. Wallace was also able to connect with his audience by using this grocery example. He further highlighted that, while individuals believed they were trapped in a ‘rat race, they had the option of choosing between two options: looking at the situation negatively and getting a bad result, or looking at it positively and feeling better about the situation.

Wallace exemplified this point by stating that the inability to make a conscious decision about what to pay attention to would irritate them every time they went shopping. He also noted that many people were narrow-minded, and loved evaluating others. However, each possessed the capacity to change a situation by making it cheerful and hopeful.

In his address ‘This is Water,’ David Foster Wallace reminded Kenyon students that education was more than a piece of paper, and did not merely comprise learning. Wallace defined education as being conscious and aware enough to generate meaning from experience. Proper education also taught people to be less arrogant and to have even a little bit of uncertainty about themselves and their convictions. Because a large percentage of people’s actions turned out to be incorrect, education was meant to put this error into words that would be alive, and conscious giving meaning to the ultimately unfulfilling, and dull lives that practically everyone was bound to mention. He also observed that speakers rarely talked about these lives in commencement speeches.

Wallace explained the entailment of a typical adult’s day, emphasizing that an average adult’s day was in no way comparable to the ones promised in entrepreneur manuals and self-help books. On the other hand, an ordinary adult day consisted of people getting up in the morning, going to their college-graduate white-collar jobs, resting afterward, and waiting for the next day (Neveu, 161). Due to their hectic schedules, they would even lack time to make themselves lunch.

However, despite the after-work fatigue, and lack of time, they always had a choice: they could either believe it was all about them and thus blame everyone. On the other hand, they could recognize that they were just a drop of water in the ocean and that everyone was dealing with a similar or the same issue.

Wallace claimed in his speech that people’s character was defined by the modest decisions they made every day in their everyday struggles. It was clear from his knowledgeable words that he explained everything from a distinct and, interesting perspective. David Foster Wallace also proposed a hypothesis in which all humans behaved on the simple premise that they were the center of the universe and that every decision they made was motivated by their desires. He claimed that people’s “default setting” was responsible for robbing them of their ability to see situations as they were (Severs, 303). In addition, he emphasized the importance of the audience combating their natural selfishness, and the constant belief that their own identity, triumphs, and failures were the most important things to them.

Wallace observed that the majority of people operated on the automatic setting. As a result, many individuals lived like robots programmed to feel through instruction and not willing, or like fish unconscious of the surrounding seas using Wallace’s metaphor. In his speech, he argued that the most crucial type of freedom entailed knowledge, discipline, concentration, and the ability to care about other people and sacrifice for them sincerely. He saw these constituents of freedom as true liberties that required education and knowledge from other points of view. However, the persistent gnawing sense of having had and lost some endless thing was the alternative to this type of freedom.

In conclusion, ‘This is Water’ emphasized the importance of exhibiting compassion and empathy for others. Wallace stated that it was essential for people to see life, and everything around them from many perspectives, irrespective of the scenario. He insisted that the audience make their lives more meaningful, beneficial, and experienced by demonstrating compassion and being mindful of others. Waiting in a severe traffic jam after a long day at work would be aggravating for most people. However, Wallace believed it was vital for such situations in life so that people could understand that life did not always revolve around them.

Also, there were significant, and more considerable reasons for the occurrence of these events. As a result, it was critical for the audience to maintain the perspective that others could be in worse conditions than themselves, and that they were not always superior to others.

Neveu, Marc J. “How’s the Water?” Journal of Architectural Education , vol. 74, no. 2, 2020, pp. 161-161.

Severs, J. “Cutting consciousness down to size: David Foster Wallace, Exformation, and the scale of encyclopedic fiction.” Scale in Literature and Culture , 2017, pp. 281-303. Web.

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This Is Water

By Jenna Krajeski

In 2005, David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class at Kenyon College with a speech that is now one of his most read pieces. In it, he argues, gorgeously, against “unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” He begins with a parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

When Wallace died, on September 12th, the water churned. Fittingly for a writer whose work encircled itself with annotations, he will leave a legacy composed not only of his novels and essays, and of pieces written about him—official obituaries, elegies, and scholarly papers—but also of a vast and growing system of Web sites, e-mails, message boards, and blogs—and comments on those blogs, and comments on those comments, ad infinitum. His life has a lot of footnotes:

• A professor at Amherst remembers Wallace, who babysat his kids, and the writer’s virtuosic senior year at the college.
• John Seery, Wallace’s colleague and workout buddy, reveals that Wallace once thanked him for accompanying him to a party otherwise full of gym rats, whom he was afraid might force him to do their algebra homework.
• Wallace, from a 1999 interview with Amherst magazine: “I fluctuate between periods of terrible sloth and paralysis and periods of high energy and production, but from what I know about other writers this isn’t unusual.”
• An ever-growing accumulation of first-person homages on McSweeney’s , including the simple statement “He helped me to stop wrecking my life, showed me how to help other people and why I should bother."
• Pomona students recall their professor, both in the classroom and on the tennis court: “He had a complete game, the kind that comes from years of obsessing over stroke technique and ball location. If there was one sign that he was more than an above-par recreational player, it was the fact that he would employ a relatively advanced tactic, what tennis geeks call ‘taking the ball off the rise.’ It requires sharp reflexes and timing. He did it repeatedly that summer afternoon in 2005."
• A series of responses on Metafilter that accumulate like a snowball rolling down a hill. One of the more recent: “I have felt really alive lately, really engaged in my life to a degree that I hadn’t been for a few years, but this was like a punch in the gut. And the head. And the heart.” The post comes with footnotes.
• Among the best of Wallace’s fellow-writers’ recollections is Ben Kunkel’s, in n+1 : “The real grief is in the death of a great artist and a kind man.”
• A skeleton key .
• “The Howling Fantods,” a fan site, memorializes, compiles, and understates : “To say that David Foster Wallace has had a profound influence on my life, the way I think, and the way in which I perceive the world, is an understatement.” (Elsewhere on the site, among numerous links, are Wallace’s uncollected writings.)
• All Wallace listserv e-mails from September.
• A syllabus from Wallace’s Literary Interpretation class, from 2005.
• Wallace speaks .

All of this is, no doubt, just the tip of the iceberg, peeking out of the sea. At Kenyon, Wallace elaborated on his water parable:

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about....The fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.

And, nearing the end of his speech:

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

This is water.

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You can hear the original delivery in two parts below, along with the the most poignant passages.

On solipsism and compassion, and the choice to see the other :

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real. Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being ‘well-adjusted’, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

On the double-edged sword of the intellect, which Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Anne Lamott have spoken to :

It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

On empathy and kindness, echoing Einstein :

[P]lease don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to. But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

On false ideals and real freedom, or what Paul Graham has called the trap of prestige :

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

On what “education” really means and the art of being fully awake to the world :

The real value of a real education [has] almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, 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 in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.

In the altogether excellent Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation , Tom Bissell writes:

The terrible master eventually defeated David Foster Wallace, which makes it easy to forget that none of the cloudlessly sane and true things he had to say about life in 2005 are any less sane or true today, however tragic the truth now seems. This Is Water does nothing to lessen the pain of Wallace’s defeat. What it does is remind us of his strength and goodness and decency — the parts of him the terrible master could never defeat, and never will.

Complement with the newly released David Foster Wallace biography .

— Published September 12, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/09/12/this-is-water-david-foster-wallace/ —

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This is Water David Foster Wallace Summary

Summary & analysis of this is water by david foster wallace.

David Foster Wallace, a renowned literary figure, delivered a commencement speech titled “This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life” at Kenyon College on May 21, 2005. The speech was later published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading in 2006. The speech emphasizes the importance of developing a conscious awareness of one’s thoughts and choosing how to perceive and respond to the world around us. It encourages listeners to consider the impact of their perspectives and assumptions on their daily lives.

  By 2005, Wallace had gained national recognition as a literary celebrity, primarily for his novel Infinite Jest, published in 1996. Additionally, he was acclaimed for his nonfiction works such as A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), Everything and More (2003), and the essay “Consider the Lobster” (2004). Among his notable collections of short stories are The Girl with the Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), and Oblivion (2004).

This is Water | Summary

  Beginning his speech with a clichéd parable from  Infinite Jest  that serves as a metaphor for the invisible forces that shape our lives and how we often fail to recognize them, David Foster Wallace  challenges the conventional expectations  placed on commencement speakers and explores the idea that certain clichés and  overused stories can still convey profound truths . Unlike the wise old fish in his analogy, Wallace does not claim to possess a profound philosophical understanding of the “water” of life. Instead, he focuses on the lessons embedded within these well-worn narratives. He asserts that the most significant and fundamental realities are often the most difficult to articulate.

  Wallace deconstructs common speech topics, such as the  value of a liberal arts education in terms of its “human value”  and the  development of critical thinking  skills rather than the accumulation of knowledge. While he found these ideas tiresome as a student, he acknowledges that there is wisdom to be found within clichés. He emphasizes that what truly matters is not how students think, but rather what they choose to direct their thoughts towards. Despite the seemingly obvious freedom to think about anything, Wallace encourages his audience to pay attention to the seemingly mundane and commonplace aspects of life.

  Wallace shares another story that highlights the  paradox of personal interpretation , emphasizing that the same experience can hold entirely different meanings for different individuals. He suggests that this concept is readily accepted from a liberal arts perspective, which promotes tolerance and diversity by avoiding categorizing anyone as definitively right or wrong. However, Wallace challenges this notion by proposing a different approach: he suggests that it is more productive to investigate an individual’s beliefs by recognizing them as an agent with free will, rather than as a predetermined object. He goes on to provide examples such as intentional choice, arrogance, and blind certainty as ways in which people shape and confine their own beliefs.

  Wallace argues that the  true value of education is not about acquiring knowledge or intellect but rather about becoming conscious and aware of one’s thinking . He suggests that our default setting is to perceive the world as revolving around ourselves, with our desires and needs at the center. This  self-centered perspective can lead to frustration , dissatisfaction, and a lack of empathy. The speech highlights the challenges of everyday life and the  monotony of routine  activities like standing in line at the grocery store or being stuck in traffic. Wallace suggests that these situations provide an opportunity to choose how to perceive them. He encourages listeners to  break free from the automatic, self-centered thinking  that often dominates their minds and instead cultivates a compassionate and empathetic approach. 

  According to Wallace, true freedom comes from making conscious choices about how to perceive and respond to the world. He acknowledges that this kind of awareness is difficult to maintain consistently, as our natural tendency is to default back to our self-centered thinking. However, he argues that with practice and effort, we can train our minds to recognize our own biases, assumptions, and automatic reactions, enabling us to choose alternative perspectives and live more fulfilling lives.

This is Water | Analysis

  “This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life” by David Foster Wallace has been critically acclaimed for its profound insights and thought-provoking ideas. The speech offers a critical analysis of various aspects of human existence, societal norms, and the power of conscious awareness.

  One of the key strengths of the speech is its exploration of the hidden realities that surround us. Wallace challenges the audience to  question their default modes of thinking  and to recognize the often overlooked aspects of everyday life. By urging listeners to pay attention to the mundane and ordinary, he prompts a critical examination of the structures and routines that shape our experiences.

  David Foster Wallace revisits the topic of liberal arts education and provides further insight by suggesting that it is not  “really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about” , about equipping students with the ability to exert control over their thoughts and choices. He emphasizes that the essence of a liberal arts education lies in developing awareness, cultivating attention, and actively constructing meaning in one’s life. Wallace cautions against allowing the mind to become a dominant force, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a sense of agency and control over our thoughts and actions. Wallace draws attention to the challenges and realities of adult life in America, such as the pressures, monotony, and frustrations that young students may not yet be intimately familiar with. He suggests that if individuals are not equipped with the necessary tools to navigate these aspects of life, it can lead to a sense of meaninglessness or even self-destructive behaviors.

  Wallace’s emphasis on the subjectivity of interpretation and the role of perspective is also a notable aspect of the speech: 

“The exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people” .

He highlights that individuals construct their understanding of the world based on their beliefs, biases, and preconceptions. This analysis encourages critical thinking and a willingness to consider alternative viewpoints, fostering a more inclusive and empathetic approach to human interactions. Wallace challenges the notion that accepting the importance of conscious awareness and personal choice is easier from a liberal arts perspective that promotes tolerance and diversity. He argues that instead of simply labeling people’s beliefs as right or wrong based on their affiliation with certain ideologies, it is more beneficial to approach individuals as agents of free will and explore the reasons behind their beliefs. Wallace highlights intentional choice, arrogance, and blind certainty as ways in which individuals construct and limit their own beliefs.

  Furthermore, Wallace critically examines the societal expectations and clichés surrounding commencement speeches. He challenges the conventional wisdom about the value of a liberal arts education and calls for a deeper examination of personal beliefs and choices. By highlighting the dangers of conformity and blind certainty, he encourages individuals to embrace intellectual curiosity and actively engage with different perspectives.

Some critics argue that while the speech offers valuable insights, it falls short in providing concrete solutions or practical guidance for implementing its ideas. Wallace’s emphasis on the awareness of one’s consciousness and the choice of what to think about may be seen as somewhat abstract and difficult to apply in daily life.

Additionally, there have been discussions about the speech’s accessibility and its relevance to individuals from diverse backgrounds. Some argue that the speaker’s message may resonate more strongly with privileged individuals who have the luxury to reflect on their existence, while others may find it less relatable or applicable to their own experiences.

  Despite these critiques, “This Is Water” remains widely regarded for its ability to provoke introspection and challenge deeply ingrained patterns of thought. It invites individuals to reconsider their assumptions, cultivate empathy, and strive for a more compassionate and mindful approach to living.

  Overall, “This Is Water” is characterized by a pervasive hyper-self-consciousness that reflects David Foster Wallace’s philosophical thinking and critical perspective. In his speech, Wallace skillfully weaves together various schools of thought, employing humorous parables such as the old fish and the encounter between an atheist and a religious person. He also draws on the insights of notable philosophers, notably Ludwig Wittgenstein, who focused on the complexities of language and communication, including the potential for misunderstandings to arise.

  Wallace’s speech demonstrates a multifaceted approach to examining the human thought process. He tackles the subject from multiple angles, employing a range of techniques to shed light on how people think and the underlying mechanisms at play. This reflects his philosophical depth and his ability to synthesize diverse ideas into a cohesive narrative.

  A Buddhist undercurrent runs through “This Is Water,” as Wallace urges the graduates to cultivate awareness, observe their surroundings, and transcend their ignorance about the true nature of life. In this regard, the speech aligns with Buddhist teachings that emphasize mindfulness and awakening. The speech also incorporates elements of perspectivism, a theory associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, which asserts that knowledge is inherently limited by an individual’s point of view and interpretation. Wallace’s use of various philosophical sources, including Nietzsche, underscores the importance of recognizing the subjective nature of our understanding and the need to embrace multiple perspectives. Drawing from these philosophical influences, Wallace highlights the presence of profound truths that often remain hidden in plain sight. He employs self-effacing statements, such as “please don’t think I’m giving you moral advice,” to bridge the gap between the speaker and the audience, inviting them to participate in the shared exploration of these truths.

  In essence, “This Is Water” stands as a testament to Wallace’s intellectual acuity, incorporating elements of humor, philosophical history, and critical analysis. It delves into the intricacies of human cognition and communication, providing a nuanced exploration of how individuals perceive and navigate the world.

  This is Water | Rhetorical Analysis

  In “This Is Water,” David Foster Wallace employs various rhetorical devices to effectively convey his message and engage the audience. Wallace employs relatable  anecdotes and parables , such as the story of the fish or the encounter between an atheist and a religious person, to illustrate his points and make them more accessible to the audience.

  Wallace utilizes  repetition  for emphasis and to reinforce key ideas throughout the speech. For example, he repeats the phrase “This is water” as a reminder of the pervasive and often overlooked realities of daily life.

  The speech includes vivid  imagery  to paint a clear picture in the minds of the listeners. For instance, Wallace describes the frustrating and mundane aspects of adult life, such as waiting in line at the grocery store or being stuck in traffic, to evoke a sense of shared experience.

  Wallace poses  rhetorical questions  to provoke thought and engage the audience in introspection. By asking questions like “What is water?” or “How do you choose to perceive the world”, he prompts listeners to reflect on their perspectives and assumptions.

  The speech often employs  contrasting ideas  and antithesis to highlight opposing viewpoints and emphasize the importance of conscious awareness. Wallace juxtaposes automatic, self-centered thinking with intentional, empathetic thinking, emphasizing the choices we have in shaping our experiences.

  Wallace incorporates  humor  throughout the speech to both entertain the audience and disarm potential resistance to his message. The use of wit and comedic elements help to keep the audience engaged and receptive to his ideas. These rhetorical devices are employed strategically by Wallace to enhance the effectiveness of his communication, making complex concepts more relatable, engaging, and memorable for the audience.

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3 Profound Life Lessons from “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace

By Kyle Kowalski · 23 Comments

In 2005, David Foster Wallace delivered the “This is Water” commencement speech at Kenyon College. I’ve studied and written about the most viewed commencement speeches in the past, but this one is special.

In just over 20 minutes, he covers the “unsexy” yet very real realities of day-to-day adult life. The graduating audience appears to laugh at various times in the speech, but I don’t think David Foster Wallace intended for any of it to be humorous. He’s calling out the “default setting” of the unconscious human minds that are all too common in mainstream society. The state of your own mind will determine how you live in the “day in and day out” and “day-to-day trenches of adult existence.”

While he pokes fun at “didactic little parable-ish stories” in commencement speeches, David Foster Wallace delivers one of the best. This post outlines my own personal interpretation of his speech.

If you’re interested, you can listen to the full speech here:

The Purpose of This is Water by David Foster Wallace

The Purpose of the Fish Story:

• “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’ “
• “If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.”
• “ The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness ; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water.’ ‘This is water.’ “

3 Profound Life Lessons from This is Water by David Foster Wallace

• “And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.”
• “If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.”
• “If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.” (Note: See my own experience with lifestyle inflation .)
• “And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.”
• “The really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.”
• “The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in.”
• “If I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop.”
• “Most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice , you can choose to look differently.”
• “The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.”
• “You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.”
• “Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
• “Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education—least in my own case—is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.”
• “If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”
• “The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness .”
• “It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.”

How are you doing on these three life lessons? Do you acknowledge your default setting? Are you exercising control and choice over your mind? How about paying attention and staying present?

• “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

About Kyle Kowalski

👋 Hi, I'm Kyle―the human behind Sloww . I'm an ex-marketing executive turned self-education entrepreneur after an existential crisis in 2015. In one sentence: my purpose is synthesizing lifelong learning that catalyzes deeper development . But, I’m not a professor, philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, scientist, mystic, or guru. I’m an interconnector across all those humans and many more—an "independent, inquiring, interdisciplinary integrator" (in other words, it's just me over here, asking questions, crossing disciplines, and making connections). To keep it simple, you can just call me a "synthesizer." Sloww shares the art of living with students of life . Read my story.

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Reader Interactions

February 13, 2019 at 10:54 PM

February 14, 2019 at 12:16 AM

You’re welcome, Mark!

July 17, 2019 at 2:41 PM

I know, this is old. I’ve just happened upon this because some one recommend this speech to me. Frankly, I hated it and DFW came across as a psychopath and an unaware narcissist. And I’ve read and reread through the transcript and I can’t see what the big deal is. I don’t know what was suppose to be so deep or moving. I’m assuming I’m wrong or missed something. Anyone care to enlighten me? I know no one will see this but I hit the web in a fit of anger and wound up here.

July 17, 2019 at 3:48 PM

“The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” Just like the fish are in water without realizing it, we are in the default setting of our minds without realizing it. We have a choice of how and what to think. In other words, we can shift from the default setting to conscious awareness.

January 23, 2020 at 8:47 PM

This was a really good, quick summary and analysis of the speech. Thanks for taking the time to do all this!

January 30, 2020 at 11:58 AM

Of course, Trent!

June 16, 2020 at 3:18 AM

Kyle. That really is an excellent summary. This essay and Hunter S Thompson’s letter to a friend are two of my absolute favourites. Keep well and thanks for writing this piece

August 6, 2020 at 12:05 AM

Appreciate it, Chris! I’ll check out the Hunter S. Thompson essay.

September 28, 2019 at 11:19 PM

Be less certain.

October 7, 2019 at 1:13 PM

You got it, Joe!

November 21, 2019 at 5:52 PM

Awesome analysis Kyle.

December 16, 2019 at 11:57 PM

I appreciate it, Jake.

January 6, 2020 at 2:57 PM

Thank you sir

January 14, 2020 at 9:40 AM

Sure thing (love your username, by the way :))

January 27, 2020 at 7:09 PM

I didn’t realise how potent the message was when I was first listened to ‘This is Water’ 6 months ago. It’s saved my life a couple of times over the last few months whilst I’ve been experiencing an existential crisis. Crazy what a shift of consciousness can mean to your understanding of the world, and your part in it. Thank you so much for this and for your blog.

January 30, 2020 at 11:33 AM

Of course, Yvie! I also revisited this speech just the other day. I think it will always be relevant because it’s so applicable to day-to-day reality. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out my own existential crisis story (along with the comments of many others experiencing their own crises today).

June 22, 2020 at 7:17 PM

I was introduced to this speech by my professor at University, and have listened and shared this speech numerous times. This speech promotes the need for empathy in our society.

August 5, 2020 at 12:22 AM

Keep sharing the good word, Jasprit!

June 9, 2023 at 12:57 AM

This is a helpful summary, Kyle! This speech is actually an eye opener and truly inspirational.

November 26, 2020 at 5:17 PM

I’m doing an English assignment on this speech, and this site helped me understand it better

February 6, 2022 at 3:11 PM

What is the English assignment?

March 2, 2022 at 11:01 PM

I am supposed to write an essay of my analysis of this speech. I just cannot figure out a way to explain the repeating phrase at the end “this is water”… It would be great if anyone can help!

July 25, 2022 at 11:05 AM

Hi Julie, I thought I would take a shot at answering your question, not in a definitive way but just in a way that came to me as I went back to the talk and listened to the end again.

What spoke to me was the part just before “this is water” which was “we need to keep reminding ourselves”. It is likely that your need for this essay is long past and you figured out a response for yourself since you wrote that in March, and here it is toward the end of July. But if I might paraphrase the ending it would be, “keep reminding ourselves that this, whatever this is that is happening in front of me and to me, is the only reality I can count on.”

My story, my take away, my lessons learned will all come from this and may or may not be true accurate or helpful, but yes, whatever this is, and in the message he presented it was “water to the fish“ is the same thing as whatever is happening to us as humans. I don’t know if this helps you but it helped me to think through this and I appreciate your question.

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Lessons from David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water”

Sahil Bloom

November 30, 2022, mindset & life lessons, today at a glance.

• On May 21, 2005, David Foster Wallace stepped up to the podium at Kenyon College to deliver the annual commencement address. If there is one piece of writing that has had the greatest impact on how I think about the world and my experience in it, it is this speech.
• When we allow our arrogance to win, we are the prisoner completely unaware of our state of imprisonment. When we fight the arrogance, we experience a richer, more complex, and more dynamic existence.
• We all come with a default setting that places ourselves at the center of the universe and disallows any level of compassion or empathy. Rejecting the default setting breathes new life into our days.
• Do not allow yourself to be enslaved by the mimetic worships of your default settings. True freedom is found in choosing how to think and what to think about.

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On May 21, 2005, David Foster Wallace stepped up to the podium at Kenyon College to deliver the annual commencement address.

The author was most well known for his novels, which had received much critical acclaim and had earned him the praise of being called, "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years."

If he were alive today, I can only assume that it would shock him to learn that the speech he delivered in 2005 would be perhaps his most durable and impactful contribution to the world.

To put it simply, if there is one piece of writing that has had the greatest impact on how I think about the world and my experience in it, it is this speech.

The speech—which would later become known as "This Is Water"—begins with a simple parable of the young fish and the old fish.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

With this clever opener, David Foster Wallace makes a central point that runs through the speech: the most important realities are often completely invisible to us (and will remain that way if we let them).

In today's piece, I'd like to take you on a short journey through his words, cover the three critical lessons that have had a lasting impact on my life, and leave you with one action item.

(Note: Italics represent quotes from the speech, with bolded portions added for emphasis)

Lesson: Fight the Arrogance

Early in the speech, Foster Wallace shares a simple story of a religious man and an atheist discussing the atheist's near-death experience at a bar.

The atheist was on the verge of death in a snowstorm, so tried praying, and was promptly saved by two eskimos who came walking past him.

The religious man hears the story as conclusive proof of the existence of a God—the prayers were answered. The atheist tells the story as conclusive proof of the lack of existence of a God—two eskimos saved him, not his prayers.

Here, Foster Wallace makes his point:

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 the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

There's a quote attributed to Mark Twain that I absolutely love: "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."

We all walk through the world in a natural state of hard-wired arrogance. It basically tells us that we are great and correct and everyone else is not-so-great and wrong.

It's easier for us to have a 100% certain view of the world—to allow every new fact to either:

• Confirm our view of reality and be absorbed, OR
• Refute our view of reality and be bounced off into oblivion.

But easy ≠ correct.

When we allow our arrogance to win, we are the prisoner completely unaware of our state of imprisonment.

When we fight the arrogance—when we learn to question some of our baseline certainties—we experience a richer, more complex, and more dynamic existence.

Lesson: Reject Your Default Setting

Building on this, Foster Wallace addresses the human propensity for allowing misery to govern the banalities of day-to-day life:

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

The "default setting" is a critical concept to internalize.

We all come with a factory setting, replete with arrogance, that places each of us at the center of our own universe and disallows the compassion or empathy that breathes new life into our days.

Foster Wallace expands on the idea with a deeper dive into the practical meaning of "day-in-day-out" in an average life. He weaves an illustration of a long day at work followed by traffic jams and a crowded supermarket—an easy-to-imagine tale of annoyance and misery.

If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred , on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

When we reject our default setting, we are letting compassion and empathy expand our worldview beyond ourselves. Not only does this enable us to view the world in a more intellectually honest manner, it also allows a fire to bring new energy to the banalities we so often dread.

Lesson: Find True Freedom

The closing section of the speech begins with a passage on the dangers of blind, unconscious worship:

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship...There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship... If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough . It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you... Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid , and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud , always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

This all reminds me of the Ancient Greek story of Narcissus, who is so obsessed with his beauty that he sees his own reflection in a pool of water, becomes entranced, and falls into the water and drowns.

That which we worship becomes that which enslaves us. When we allow mimetic desire and default settings to control our worship, we are on a collision course with misery.

But when we reject our default settings, we can embrace our ability to choose how we direct our attention and awareness:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day ...That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing… It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: “This is water.”

True freedom is found in choosing how to think and what to think about—in the recognition that the choice is yours to make and you alone have the power to make it.

Let us all commit to making that choice—to reminding ourselves, day-in-day-out, that This Is Water.

Wrapping Up

Summarizing the three key lessons to take home with you today:

• Fight the Arrogance: When we allow our arrogance to win, we are the prisoner completely unaware of our state of imprisonment. When we fight the arrogance, we experience a richer, more complex, and more dynamic existence.
• Reject the Default Setting: We all come with a default setting that places ourselves at the center of the universe and disallows any level of compassion or empathy. Rejecting the default setting breathes new life into our days.
• Find True Freedom: Do not allow yourself to be enslaved by the mimetic worships of your default settings. True freedom is found in choosing how to think and what to think about.

This all leads to a single action item I humbly request you all take:

This week, when you inevitably encounter some situation in which you find yourself defaulting to a state of boredom, annoyance, or misery, pause a moment and consider how else you might choose to perceive the situation.

This simple act of defiance will compound if you let it.

You may find yourself experiencing new and unexpected joy in the banalities of life.

You may find yourself realizing that the water is pretty nice today...

For more, you can find the full speech audio here and the full transcript here .

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This is Water – David Foster Wallace

Wisdom | 3 comments

Charlie Rose interviewed the late David Foster Wallace, on March 27, 1997

“How’s the water?”

… The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about…

…the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…

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

… the real value of a real education… has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

DFW KenyonAddress 2005 Transcript

David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008  Excerpts from the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address . An Appreciation of David Wallace by David Gates: Newsweek Web Exclusive

The New York Times , Sunday Book Review: Great and Terrible Truths :

“Truthful, funny and unflaggingly warm, the address was obviously the work of a wise and very kind man. At the edges, though, there was something else – the faint but unmistakable sense that Wallace had passed through considerable darkness, some of which still clung to him… The glory of the work and the tragedy of the life are relations but not friends, informants but not intimates. Exult in one; weep for the other.” by Tom Bissell

Zen Moments is seeking permission from the publishers to republish a longer extract of this speech.

Photo by  Fabrizio Comolli with kind permission.

Thank you to John Morgan for suggesting this article.

This Is Water: Some Thoughts…

“It’s a short book, only 134 pages, with one sentence per page which leaves a lot of white space on every page. In other words, the book is for people who think about what they read… It’s the Abraham Lincoln approach; he didn’t have a lot to say at Gettysburg in 1863, and the brevity of his remarks was roundly condemned at the time; but, the content has stood the test of time, just as I suspect this book will stand the test of time.” Amazon customer review

“Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike’s deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.” Amazon Review

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an award-winning American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was cited as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 by Time magazine.

Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace “one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years”. With his suicide, he left behind an unfinished novel, The Pale King, which was subsequently published in 2011, and in 2012 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which was not awarded that year.  Wikipedia

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Analysis Of The David Foster Wallace's Speech "This Is Water"

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Analysis of david foster wallace's commencement speech.

• Danesi, M. (2017). Language, society, and new media: Sociolinguistics today. Routledge.
• Foster Wallace, D. (2005). This is water: Some thoughts, delivered on a significant occasion, about living a compassionate life. Little, Brown and Company.
• Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Bantam Books.
• Hansen, M. H. (2013). Ethos, logos, and pathos: The structure of a great speech. Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics, 10(2), 107-110.
• Hedges, M. (2016). Communicating well in the era of distraction. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 44(1), 1-17.
• Pink, D. H. (2006). A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future. Riverhead Books.
• Quine, W. V. (2013). Word and object. MIT press.

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This is Water

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David Foster Wallace: This Is Water (Video and Transcript)

David Foster Wallace is one of my all time favourite authors. From the hilarious and varied essays of   A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again  to the incredible genius of  Infinite Jest , he is likely to go down as one of the world’s greatest authors. Indeed,  Infinite Jest  was cited as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 by  Time  magazine.

Tragically, he committed suicide in September 2008. In an interview with  The New York Times , Wallace’s father reported that Wallace had suffered from depression for more than 20 years and that antidepressant medication had allowed him to be productive. Unfortunately, in the time leading up to his death, his depression became more and more severe.

One of the most accessible and enjoyable pieces of Wallace’s work is his Commencement Address at Kenyon College given in 2005. It’s a short read, which shouldn’t take longer than 20 minutes to get through, but gives you a valuable insight into his style, humour and brilliance. And it’s damn good advice for life.

So I was delighted to see that The Glossary have put a video to Wallace’s words, to fantastic effect. Here’s the description from the video:

"In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we’ve ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education. We made this video, built around an abridged version of the original audio recording, with the hopes that the core message of the speech could reach a wider audience who might not have otherwise been interested."

Here’s the video itself (watch the video in full screen and put your headphones on for a fully immersive experience):

Beautiful, no?

The full This Is Water transcript is below, in case you’re interested and want to re-read at a later date.

I highly recommend you read up on Wallace, dive into his books, and experience more of his genius for yourself.

Now, back to tackling Infinite Jest…

Transcription of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address – May 21, 2005 (via Marginalia)

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How’s the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

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 fifty 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. 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 the 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.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own case — is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible — sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really 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 the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

David Foster Wallace’s Use of Rhetoric in This is Water

• Categories: Book Review David Foster Wallace Novel

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Published: Sep 1, 2020

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Works Cited:

• Alsbury, T. (2016). 10 Things About Being a Superhero That No One Talks About. Relevant Magazine.
• Batman Begins. (2005). [Film]. Warner Bros.
• Coates, T. (2018). Martin Luther King Jr. Was More Radical Than We Remember. The Atlantic.
• Harrison, C. (2019). 30 Everyday Heroes Who Changed Someone's Life Forever. Reader's Digest. https://www.rd.com/list/everyday-heroes-changed-someones-life-forever/
• Jenkins, P. (2006). Superman Returns. [Film]. Warner Bros.
• Krueger, P. (2014). Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. DC Comics.
• LeFevre, C. (2019). 9 Ways to Be a Hero for Someone Else Today. Success Magazine. https://www.success.com/9-ways-to-be-a-hero-for-someone-else-today/
• Martin, S. (2018). Motherhood is Heroic: Celebrating the Ordinary Superheroes Among Us. Today's Parent. https://www.todaysparent.com/family/parenting/motherhood-is-heroic-celebrating-the-ordinary-superheroes-among-us/
• Pallotta, F. (2018). 11 Real-Life Heroes Who Have Changed the World. Global Citizen.
• Spider-Man. (2002). [Film]. Columbia Pictures.

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This is Water

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If at this moment you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete...

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real-you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home-you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job-and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out. You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death , and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV- intensive rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et cetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to foodshop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me , about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way , and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people .

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-theday traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do-except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am-it is actually I who am in his way. And so on.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line-maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible-it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on your default-setting-then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious . They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. 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. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. 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 thirty, or maybe fifty, 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."

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Audiobooks for Long-Haul Listening

Some books sprint; others take the scenic route. The heady, highly absorbing titles here earn their marathon run times.

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By Alexander Nazaryan

Alexander Nazaryan writes about politics, culture and science.

Hear me out: Summer, with its hikes and bikes trips, is the perfect season for long audiobooks. I mean, the sound of birds is nice and all. Just not for three hours.

Conventional wisdom suggests you should settle for a beach read — or beach listen, in this case. And believe me, I love a fun, sexy mystery like Emma Rosenblum’s “Bad Summer People .” But I save those for winter, when the shores of Fire Island (where Rosenblum’s novel is set) seem impossibly distant.

Use summer for more ambitious projects. I’ve found long audiobooks to be perfect companions for those 10 weeks or so when the kids go off to camp and the pace of life generally slows.

Below, a few of my favorite supersized listens.

THE DYING GRASS, by William T. Vollmann

Vollmann is not known for accessibility ( his first novel was about insects and electricity), but “The Dying Grass” is a remarkably readable account of the 1877 Nez Perce War, made even more so by Henry Strozier’s sensitive narration. As Brig. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard hounds his Native adversaries across Montana and Idaho, the story soars above the awesome landscape, then peers into the hearts of people below. Believe me, time will fly.

Also try: “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” by Robert Burton; “War and Peace,” by Leo Tolstoy

ON HIS OWN TERMS: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller, by Richard Norton Smith

Here is a storied American family in its third generation, with the Rockefeller brothers taking on newfound civic responsibilities. Nelson was the most ambitious of them and maybe the most tragic, his bid for the presidency undone by a divorce . Paul Michael (“The Da Vinci Code”) narrates with stately confidence.

“Ducks, Newburyport,” by Lucy Ellmann

A woman in Ohio thinks about life. About illness, marriage and Laura Ingalls Wilder. She frets about the pies she bakes for a living. Also, there’s a mountain lion. Written as a single sentence stretching more than 1,000 pages, this remarkable 2019 novel thrums with life, a quality highlighted by Stephanie Ellyne’s energetic narration.

Also try: “1Q84,” by Haruki Murakami; “Hitler,” by Ian Kershaw

THE PASSAGE OF POWER, by Robert Caro

The fourth volume of Caro’s encyclopedic biography of L.B.J. begins with the gruff Texan becoming vice president to John F. Kennedy, an odd man out in an administration of Ivy Leaguers. But then comes a shattering Dallas afternoon. Our most esteemed historian , Caro thrillingly tells the story of how Johnson prods Congress and transforms a grieving nation with his civil rights and Great Society legislation.

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, by Thomas Pynchon

George Guidall is one of the great audiobook narrators , and his rendition of Pynchon’s masterpiece quickly makes clear why as he captures Tyrone Slothrop’s madcap journey across Europe, which involves orgies and Nazis, a Malcolm X set piece and a good deal about ballistics. I can’t imagine a harder book to narrate — or anyone who could do the job as well as Guidall.

THE DAVID FOSTER WALLACE READER

The immensity of Wallace’s achievement can be daunting, but the “Reader” is a perfect distillation of his fiction and nonfiction alike. While most selections are performed by professionals, there are cameos from the Emmy winner Bobby Cannavale; Wallace’s mother, Sally; and Wallace himself, who died in 2008 .

Also try: “The Covenant of Water,” by Abraham Verghese; “Daniel Deronda,” by George Eliot; “And the Band Played On,” by Randy Shilts

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS, by Marlon James

It is only appropriate that a panoply of narrators (seven in all) take on this kaleidoscopic novel, which is nominally about the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley but is in reality the story of Jamaica. “Brief History” was James’s breakout novel, winning the Man Booker Prize in 2015 . The narration matches the intensity of the prose; it’s as close as you can get to cinema without a screen.

THE SECRET HISTORY, by Donna Tartt

One of the smartest mysteries in the modern American canon, set at a bucolic New Hampshire college. Tartt herself narrates; though she may be a Mississippi native, her voice is neither Deep South nor New England. Like the novel itself, it is entirely her own.

WOLF HALL, by Hilary Mantel

Yes, you may need to consult the printed novel to keep track of the characters, but the effort is well worth it as Mantel pulls you ever deeper into 16th-century England and the life of her indefatigable protagonist, Thomas Cromwell. The narrator, Simon Slater, a noted British actor and composer, only enhances that journey.

RANDOM FAMILY, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

LeBlanc spent more than a decade as a virtual member of a South Bronx family as it struggled with drugs and crime, early pregnancy and poverty. Though the tone of Roxana Ortega’s narration is not always entirely in sync with the text, LeBlanc’s reportage is sensitive but not preachy, an unvarnished portrait of New York’s most neglected borough.

Also try: “Watergate,” by Garrett M. Graff; “Demon Copperhead,” by Barbara Kingsolver; “Lenin’s Tomb,” by David Remnick

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