This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Not exactly the Divinity School Address ("In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life"). Proves that even great writers can write drivel. Something in it about some fish and what to think about; but like most commencement speeches, you just want to get out of the gown

Show More

and get drunk.

Show Less

This non-fiction book is actually a printed transcript of a commencement speech DFW gave to Kenyon College in 2005. The layout of the book is a small hand-sized hardback with one sentence on each page. I like this layout because it gives gravity to every sentence that was spoken on that day. This

Show More

is something that most people giving speeches wishes for each sentence he utters; for everyone to think on the sentence that was just spoken.
Wallace gives a very intellectualized account of what it is to 1. Give a commencement speech, and 2. What those speeches are good for and what they speak on. He urges the listeners to look deeper into old warn out cliché’s such as, “A liberal arts education is supposed to teach you how to think.” And he gives plenty of practical knowledge about what this is truly meant to mean, i.e. that we are given a choice on how to think about our drudgerous life outside of college in the “real world” and we should use that ability to decide not to live a life in which one feels trapped in a kind of center of the universe mindset that causes people to ultimately live unhappy lives.
This book was originally a commencement speech, therefore, the language is pointedly geared toward adults. However, the principles taught in the book speak directly to the human condition. And as such, the essence of the book/speech is pertinent for anyone thinking they want to go into the “real world” and live a life outside of the shelter of irresponsibility. I would definitely want to teach a lesson based on this book to any number of classes that has to do with furthering ones education or skipping to do so with the thought that the real world is better than the school setting most of my students tend to loath.

Show Less

This is a short read ... a commencement address to 2005 graduates of Kenyon College. This book may be of interest to fans or critics of the author. The author mentions suicide a number of times throughout his address. David Foster Wallace's words are a call to compassion and mindfulness. A reviewer

Show More

in TIME magazine dubbed This is Water "The Last Lecture for intellectuals".

Show Less

Choose what you worship. It will consume you, and you have no oðer choice.

Wallace tells a couple of sort of hoary anecdotes in an uncomfortably self-reflexive style, reminds us that life is hard and boring and that we'll get by it better if we can extend other people the courtesy of not imagining we know their circumstances. But also:

"It will actually be within your

Show More

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 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."

Show Less

Doesn't take long to read, but some fantastic advice.

A nice little speech that is undoubtedly more illuminating in what it says about DFW than it does about life. It all probably seemed rather banal before he sadly killed himself. In retrospect parts of it take on a deeper and darker meaning.

Recommended only for those big fans of DFW. It's not

Show More

amazing but it's extremely short and worth it if you're interested.

Show Less

SHORT little book- actually a commencement speech - with some thought provoking statements- such as we all live in our own here and now, but we need to be conscious of other people's here and nows- and not just float through life, but pay attention

David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" is a transcript of a speech the author gave to Kenyon College in 2005. You can probably find this speech online and hear the same information contained in this book for free, but I'm naturally a reader and enjoy reading the printed word. I get more out of the

Show More

content when I read instead of listen.

One of the things I liked best about this book is the way that the prose was broken up into brief segments on each page so that I could digest it piece by piece. The whole book can be read in about an hour, but the short passages on each page help with the pacing so that each line is taken in more thoughtfully.

The main theme of the message is that we often miss seeing the things that are right in front of us, the things that are obvious. The author makes the point beautifully be starting off with a story and then he fills in the details. This is a short but excellent work.

Show Less

As another reviewer said: it's sad and ironic. A few pages from the end he says: "It is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head."

The speech by itself is very clearly and sharply written, but I think it's best to be honest and say its content is

Show More

not very interesting. The claim is that a humanities education doesn't teach you how to think (that, as he says, is the inevitable cliché), but it teaches you what to think about, how to concentrate, how to find your own thoughts, how and when to choose to think, so that you are not overwhelmed by anxiety and solipsism. A more common academic version of that critique of the idea that the humanities teaches people how to think is that it helps people make up their own minds about such things as politics, society, identity, and values, so that people can think independently. Many versions of that kind of claim exist, from Jaroslav Pelikan to Theodor Adorno... but notice Wallace is saying something much simpler and more precarious: he is saying that a successful education in the humanities will let a person tune out the drone of self-serving animal anxiety that drives what he thinks of as ordinary contemporary life. (As in his writing, the examples of contemporary life are such things as shopping and driving home after work.)

Even if he had not committed suicide, that would be a tremendously sad conclusion. Even if we only had "Infine Jest," that conclusion would make the utter ordinariness of the tennis camp even more poignant, because it would be even clearer -- if it needed to be -- that the limited experiences described in that book, as in his others, can be read as more-or-less desperate efforts to avoid a hole of pessimism and depression. And because he did commit suicide, this speech is really tremendously sad.

(Why, I wonder, did the publisher decide not to tell us where he gave the speech? Was the university not prestigious enough to help sell copies? Or was it so prestigious that it might ask for royalties? Anyone know?)

Show Less

An immeasurably valuable speech for anyone who tends to get bored and frustrated with people and routine, and appreciates a great thinker laying down some basic but ignored, perhaps forgotten truths.

I really needed this right now. Though, if I'm being honest, I doubt there will ever be a time in my life where I might pick this up and think differently.

Good lesson about CHOOSING what you think, and changing your perspective. We have the choice on how we view the world around us.

I listened to this on Youtube while folding the laundry.

Next, a volume of DFW's collected grocery lists...

Pithy little book about the "meaning" of life (= being mindful and getting outside of one's head) ... originally delivered as a commencement address. Author David Foster Wallace means, of course, that it is well-written and thought-provoking.

Hard to rate, as it is a commencement speech...worth it for his several mentions of suicide. Creepy. Standard DFW fare.

A wonderful, thoughtful book. The text comes from a speech delivered by David Foster Wallace when he was the commencement speaker at Kenyon College, and it is relevant, honest, and fresh. My one quibble would be that you used to be able to find the speech's text online for free; since the book has

Show More

been published, I believe the online copies were removed due to copyright concerns. This is reasonable; however, the speech is so short, that in order to make it into a book, the publisher has put one sentence on each page, and I don't find that it translates well to this format. It's also remarkably expensive for its length. Still, a lovely book. Definitely worth a look.

Show Less

Meh. He seems to always be getting to a point, but veers away. I find Wallace to be enormously overrated. He merely sounds profound, but he isn't.

I must admit that I'd never before read anything by David Foster Wallace. So within the first 10 pages or so of reading this book I thought that it was the sad transcribed ramblings of a tired, old man who was on his "way out".

The book format could be a bit off putting, especially if someone paid

Show More

full price for this in a store. It is a couple hundred word speech, stretched out to 130+ pages for about $15. However, the information it contains is priceless, especially in correlation to DFW's reported suicide.

It is a transcription of a college commencement speech that David Foster Wallace gave in 2005, and it is both scary and brilliant. DFW explains to the graduating class of 2005 the "value of education", which, according to him, is to allow an individual to have control over what and how they think. He states it explicitly while throwing in comments about what is expected: expected from commencement speeches, expected from our selves, and expected from life.

Though the language is not dumbed down, it is clear. We have choices in life, and it is better to be aware when we make them than to be on autopilot.

Show Less

It's difficult to see what's all around you...DFW has some nice similes and thought experiments to help. I'm glad this got printed, as a speech it would have been gone too fast.