Search results
David Foster Wallace's remarkable 2005 commencement speech, This is Water, is a timeless trove of wisdom for living a meaningful life. Here is a full transcript along with audio.
This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life is an essay by David Foster Wallace. The text originates from a commencement speech Wallace gave at Kenyon College on May 21, 2005.
- David Foster Wallace
- 137
- 2009
- April 14, 2009
This Is Water. 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 ...
People also ask
What was David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech?
What is This is water about?
Who was David Foster Wallace?
Why does Wallace have no philosophical explanation for the water?
“This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life” is an essay by David Foster Wallace that was delivered as a commencement speech at Kenyon College on May 21, 2005. The speech was first published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading in 2006.
- You’re not the center of the universe. A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
- Don’t live life by default. 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.
- You choose what you worship. 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.
- Real freedom is sacrifice. 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.