David Foster Wallace - This Is Water
In 2005 novelist David Foster Wallace gave
the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College in
Gambier, Ohio. Three years later, Wallace tragically died, and only then did
the speech become widely known. The Glossary recently turned Wallace’s
commencement address into a stimulating video with hopes of reaching a much
larger audience as graduation nears.
View the
entire transcript here.
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?"
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 "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 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my
knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this
blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar,
the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must
believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The
atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos
happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of
a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two
totally different things to two different people, given those people's two
different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from
experience. 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 closemindedness 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...
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