This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life by David Foster Wallace
Summary
This is Water is an essay written by writer and philosopher David Foster Wallace, delivered as a commencement address in 2005. It is a short essay, composed at times with only a few words per page, reading just as much like poetry as philosophical essay. At the heart of the essay the author asks, and in turn answers the questions:
How do we keep from going through adult life unconsciously, comfortably entrenched in habit?
How do we remove ourselves from the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion?
In short, Wallace makes his case to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College, that the true value of a liberal arts education is “learning how to think”, as the platitude often goes, which he expands to mean having the ability to choose to live your life consciously and compassionately. The first few sentences explain the essay’s namesake:
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen tot 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 eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?'”
He ultimately resolves to explain his didactic parable as an example that many adults, who have not been taught how to think, live the majority of their life in an unconscious state, completely unaware of the ubiquitous things around them.
Favorite Quotes
What follows are some of the sentences that were highlighted by the time I finished reading the essay.
“True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogantly certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us here, but the fact is that the religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s atheists – arrogance, blind certainty, a closed-mindedness that’s like an imprisonment so complete that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up. The point here is that I think this is one part of what the liberal arts mantra of “teaching me how to think” is really supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have some “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.”
“Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me. Instead of paying attention to what’s going on inside me. As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your head.”
“‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”
“And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.”
“If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important – if you want to operate on your default setting – then you, like me, probably will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.”
“…Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the ‘rat race’ – the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lose some infinite thing.”
“The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about the real value of a real education, which has nothing to do with grades or degrees and everything to do with simple awareness – awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water’. ‘This is water’. ‘These Eskimos might be much more than they seem.’ It is unimaginably hard to do this – to live consciously, adultly, day in and day out.”