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

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More About This Book

Overview

Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.

Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.

  • Molly's Top Tags! April 13
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Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble
"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?' " After you finish reading David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, you too will feel awash in new experiences. This speech, Wallace's most direct personal statement before his death in 2008, has circulated on the Net in various forms since the day of its presentation.
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
The Barnes & Noble Review
David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, a grim reality that unavoidably colors This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, a commencement address he gave at Kenyon College in 2005. This slim publication -- its 134 pages often contain one sentence -- warns of the dangerous, unhappy depressions of self-absorption and says "learning how to think," that old liberal arts mantra, "really means learning how to exercise some control over how andwhat you think." Every life experience casts us in the lead role, and that default setting is our greatest obstacle, Wallace says. "Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to food shop, because my natural default setting is that situations like this are really all about me." To combat this attitude, we must be mindful and vigilant. "It means being aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed." In short, don't sweat the small stuff, because, well, most of it is small stuff. Clinical depression was not small stuff to David Foster Wallace. His suicide doesn't trivialize the advice in this brief, charming volume; but his advice doesn't help us understand his death, either. --Cameron Martin

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780316068222
  • Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
  • Publication date: 4/14/2009
  • Pages: 144
  • Sales rank: 54,110
  • Product dimensions: 4.70 (w) x 6.70 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
Best known as the author of the audacious, shelf-bending postmodern masterpiece Infinite Jest, novelist, essayist, and short story writer David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was one of the most influential writers of the late 20th century.

Biography

Born in Ithaca, NY, and raised in Champaign, IL, David Foster Wallace grew up athletically gifted and exceptionally bright, with an avid interest in tennis, literature, philosophy, and math. He attended Amherst and graduated in 1985 with a double major in English and Philosophy. His philosophy thesis (on modal logic) won the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize. His English thesis would become his first novel, The Broom of the System. Published in 1987 during his second year of grad school at the University of Arizona, the book sold well, garnering national attention and critical praise in equal measure. Two years later, a book of short stories, Girl with Curious Hair, was published to admiring reviews.

In the early 1990s, Wallace's short fiction began to appear regularly in publications like Playboy, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker, along with excerpts from his second novel, a complex, enormously ambitious work published in 1996 as Infinite Jest. Surpassing 1,000 pages in length, the novel was hailed as a masterpiece ("[A]n entertainment so irresistibly pleasurable it renders the viewer catatonic," raved Newsweek. "[R]esourceful, hilarious, intelligent, and unique," pronounced Atlantic Monthly), and Wallace was crowned on the spot the new heavyweight champion of literary fiction.

Hyperbole aside, Infinite Jest, with its linguistic acrobatics (challenging complex clauses, coined words, etc.) and sly, self-referential footnotes, proved to be the template for a new literary style. Subversive, hip, and teeming with postmodernist irony, the book attracted a rabid cult following and exerted an influence on up-and-coming young writers that is still felt today. The scope of Wallace's achievement can be measured by the fact that one year after the publication of Infinite Jest, he was awarded the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant."

Nearly as famous for his nonfiction as for his novels and stories, Wallace produced mind-boggling essays on assignment for magazines like Harper's. In contrast to his sad, dark, disturbing fiction, these essays -- subsequently collected into such bestselling anthologies as A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), Everything and More (2003), and Consider the Lobster (2007) -- were ridiculously exuberant, fairly bursting with humor, energy, and good cheer. Yet Wallace himself suffered from clinical depression most of his adult life. He was treated successfully with anti-depressants, until side effects from the drugs began to interfere with his productivity. At his doctor's suggestion, he stopped taking the medication.The depression returned, and he did not respond to any further treatment. In September of 2008, at the age of 46, he committed suicide.

Wallace's influence on contemporary literature cannot be overstated. Descended from post-war superstars like Thomas Pynchon and Don De Lillo, his style is clearly visible in the work of postmodernists like Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers. His untimely death was mourned by critics, writers, and millions of adoring fans. As author David Lipsky stated in a tribute that aired on NPR in September, 2008: "To read David Foster Wallace was to feel your eyelids pulled open."

    1. Date of Birth:
      February 21, 1962
    2. Place of Birth:
      Ithaca, NY
    1. Date of Death:
      September 12, 2008
    2. Place of Death:
      Claremont, CA
    1. Education:
      B.A. in English & Philosophy, Amherst College, 1985;MFA, University of Arizona, 1987
Customer Reviews
Average Rating 4.5
( 24 )

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  • Posted April 20, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    Don't Bother

    DFW is one of my favorite writers, but this book is really a waste of money. The layout is one sentence per page so they can justify putting a speech into book form in order to capitalize just a little bit more on his death. Unfortunately this plan worked on me, so please don't let it work on you. Seriously, don't waste your money on this "book." They may as well have just dressed this up as some inspirational page-a-day book that you can open up every morning and take one quote from. Then we could've spent a day living our lives by "Or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning." The only difference is you can't hide how ridiculous, unnecessary, and financially motivated a DFW daily book of inspirational quotes is. With this book, they're able to dress up their motivations with a minimalist book cover.

    2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted April 21, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    I wish I had been in the audience but kinda glad I wasn't-would like to hear from anyone who was @ Kenyon 2005 Commencement

    I found this essay so resonating that I sent the online article to practically everyone I knew. To those middle aged denizens who remember their life when if felt real, to those youth who live in the now and vow never to change, this book will speak to them. In addition to graduation cash I plan to give this to young people I know who graduate from high school or college. I am so pleased that DFW's words were given the honor of being bound in a book; they are too weighty just to remain electronic or on fading newsprint. When after a harrowing day or a soul-sucking encounter I read this and it helps me to find my center, again. Yeah you can find this elsewhere and I am not big on paying for what is out there for free, but this, in a book, gives heft, gives importance and so David Foster Wallace is and also his words.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 5, 2009

    Poignant and Concise

    I am a deep thinker but I have ADD when it comes to reading. This book was originally supposed to be a gift for a friend who had just graduated from college but I had to sneak a peak. Once I opened it up I couldn't stop reading. That rarely happens to me.

    Very moving.
    Very honest.
    Very good.

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  • Posted June 8, 2009

    This is A Commencement Speech

    Oh to have been a graduate of Kenyon College when David Foster Wallace gave this speech! I wish mine had been as compelling. If ever I were to give a commencement address I hope it would be as hip, intelligent, funny and thoughtful as this. Well worth reading and giving as a gift to college graduates.

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  • Posted June 8, 2009

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    DFW

    a really nice, little book. a lesson about life from a great writer.

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