This Is Water (2005)

Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water. Little, Brown, and Company, 2009.

A few years back I began reading two Kenyon College commencement speeches as a sort of liturgy. I listened to them. I memorized them. I read them in the morning and at night, in the middle of the workday. I proffered them to anyone who would listen (and many who wouldn't). The first speech, from 1990, was Bill Watterson's address entitled "Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled." This sage creator of the masterpiece cartoon series Calvin and Hobbes absolutely nails the common experience of suffering through a post-college "real job." The other is the 2005 speech by David Foster Wallace, whose 1996 postmodernist novel Infinite Jest elevated him above cult and campus status and into international acclaim. Some people think I'm crazy for spending $10 on a book whose text is available for free online, but my defense is that Little, Brown, and Company produced a small volume of the speech that forces the reader to slow down and capture the impact of DFW's wisdom-infused sentences. They do this by dedicating each page of the book to a single sentence. At first I thought this would be cumbersome and degrade the experience, but it actually serves as an enhancement. In his usual way, DFW is at once irreverent and subversive while also being didactic and perspicacious. From his two opening anecdotes and vivid descriptions of "the day in and day out" of life, he challenges us to change our thinking. We cannot help but naturally feel that we are the center of everything—but the path to wisdom, the path a learned person should follow, is in willfully determining what to think.