David Foster Wallace: This is Water
Here's the obligatory graduation cap stock photo. (Via Korean Resource Center/Flickr)
I think most of us can agree that commencement speeches at graduation ceremonies are generally lame and boring.
So I can’t imagine what the Kenyon College Class of 2005 (especially the English majors) must have thought when they realized David Foster Wallace would be giving their commencement speech.
The speech, entitled “This is Water,” has since been published as a book and featured in The Wall Street Journal, The London Times, and all over the internet. So as usual, I’m late to the game.
After reading the entire speech, I’m struck by the wisdom in it, and perplexed by the fact that a man with that kind of wisdom about life would take his own. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts:
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, be 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. …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.
That’s powerful stuff, if you ask me. And it saddens me to know that, ultimately, David Foster Wallace was almost self-prophetic in allowing something to eat him alive.
Go here to read the rest of the commencement speech. I highly recommend it.
With this kind of post, you really are going to make me read DFW. Quite simply, this man has a magnetic intellect.
I do what I can. That said, his nonfiction work is much easier to follow than his fiction.
So proud of my alma mater!
That kind of excerpt tells me not so much that it was prophetic but that it was coming from personal experience. I wonder which consumed him?
Who knows. He really does seem in touch with the human psyche. Just a brilliant dude.
I had never heard a non lame, non boring commencement speech until my brother’s graduation from Belmont last year. The whole speech was song lyrics from decades of great music. I was pleasantly surprised—and delighted not to be bored out of my skull!
Wow, wow, wow.
I am amazed by his perception of reality and, even more so, at his ability to communicate it. I had never heard of DFW before your blog, and now I am quite intrigued.
Awesome. Glad this blog is worth something. Ha.
I had heard of him but I’m learning a lot more as I have read this book and researched him. Really an amazing guy and such a shame that he died so soon.
After reading his graduation speech I think I’m going to have to check out his books. Definitely sounds like someone who has given a lot of thought to everyday life and things that most people never think about.
I was going to hit the “like” button on this, but that wasn’t really true – maybe we need a “that’s really interesting/moving/thought provoking” button – but I guess that’s what comments are for. In light of his suicide, it’s tough for me to read that without thinking that he was fully aware that he was being consumed and that he felt powerless against it.
When I read Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College, I was blown away. The man had brilliant things to offer, and it’s such an incredible shame that he’s no longer writing and speaking brilliant things. I think we’re lucky to have his words to read, as he has certainly made a great contribution to the valuable voices out there.